 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting FutureCloud, one event, a world of opportunities. Brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna, who's the director of product management for ECS at Cisco. And James Leach is the director of business development for UCS at Cisco as well. We're going to talk about computing in the age of hybrid cloud. Welcome gentlemen, great to see you. Thank you. Thank you. Vikas, let's start with you and talk a little bit about computing architectures. We know that they're evolving, they're supporting new data intensive and other workloads, especially these high performance workload requirements. What's Cisco's point of view on all this? I mean, specifically, I'm interested in your thoughts on fabrics. I mean, it's kind of your wheelhouse. You've got accelerators. What are the workloads that are driving these evolving technologies? And how is it impacting customers? What are you seeing? Sure, Dave. First of all, very excited to be here today. You're absolutely right. The pace of innovation in foundational platform ingredients have just been phenomenal in recent years. The fabric, the accelerators, the drives, the processing power, the core density, all have been evolving at just an amazing pace. And the pace will only pick up further. But ultimately, it is all about applications and the way applications leverage those innovations. And we do see applications evolving quite rapidly. The new classes of applications are evolving to absorb those innovations and deliver much better business values. Very, very exciting time step. But talking about the impact on the customer, well, these innovations have helped them very positively. We do see significant challenges in the data center with the point product-based approach of delivering these platform innovations to the applications. What has happened is these innovations today are being packaged as point products to meet the needs of a specific application. And as you know, the different applications have no different needs. Some applications need more GPUs. Others need more memory. Yet others need more cores. Some need different kind of fabrics. As a result, if you walk into a data center today, it is very common to see many different point products in the data center. This creates a manageability challenge. Imagine the aspect of managing several different form factors. One, you do your purpose-built servers, the variety of a blade form factor. This reminds me of the situation we had before smartphones arrived. You remember the days when we used to have a GPS device for navigation system, a cool music device for listening to the music, a phone device for making a call, camera for taking the photos. And we were all excited about it. It's when the smartphones arrived that we realized all those cool innovations could be delivered in a much simpler, much convenient, and easy to consume through one device and that could completely transform our experience. So we see the customers who are benefiting from these innovations to have a way to consume those things in a much more simplistic way than they are able to do today. And I like, look, it's always been about the applications, but to your point, the applications are now moving at a much faster pace. The customer experience is, expectation is way escalated. And when you combine all these, I love your analogy there because when you combine all these capabilities, it allows us to develop new applications, new capabilities, new customer experiences. So that's, I always say, the next 10 years, they ain't going to be like the last. And James. Absolutely. Public cloud obviously is heavily influencing compute design and customer operating models. You know, it's funny when the public cloud first hit the market, everyone, we were swooning about low cost, standard off the shelf servers in storage devices, but it quickly became obvious that customers needed more. So I wonder if you could comment on this. How are the trends that we've seen from the hyperscalers, how are they filtering into on-prem infrastructure? And maybe, you know, maybe there's some differences there as well that you could address. Absolutely. So, you know, I'd say, first of all, quite frankly, you know, public cloud has completely changed the expectations of how our customers want to consume compute, right? So customers, especially in a public cloud environment, they've gotten used to or, you know, come to accept that they should consume from the application out, right? They want a very application-focused view, a services-focused view of the world. They don't want to think about infrastructure, right? They want to think about their application. They want to move outward, right? So this means that the infrastructure basically has to meet the application where it lives. So what that means for us is that, you know, we're taking a different approach. We've decided that, you know, we're not going to chase this, you know, single pane of glass view of the world, which, you know, frankly, our customers don't want. They don't want a single pane of glass. What they want is a single operating model. They want an operating model that's similar to what they can get with the public cloud, but they want it across all of their cloud options. They want it across private cloud, across hybrid cloud options as well. So what that means is they don't want to just consume infrastructure services. They want all of their cloud services from this operating model. So that means that they may want to consume infrastructure services for automation and orchestration, but they also need Kubernetes services. They also need virtualization services. They may need Terraform, workload optimization. All of these services have to be available from within the operating model, a consistent operating model, right? So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about private cloud, hybrid cloud, anywhere, where the application lives, doesn't matter. What matters is that we have a consistent model that we think about it from the application out. And frankly, I'd say, you know, this has been the stumbling block for private cloud. Private cloud is hard, right? This is why it hasn't been really solved yet. This is why we had to take a brand new approach. And frankly, it's why we're super excited about X-Series and InterSight as that, that, you know, operating model that fits the hybrid cloud better than anything else we've seen. This is a cube first. First times, a technology vendor has ever said that it's not about a single pane of glass, because I've been hearing for decades we're going to deliver a single pane of glass that's going to be seamless and it never happens. It's like a single version of the truth. It's aspirational and it's just not reality. So can we stay in the X-Series for a minute, James? Maybe in this context. But in the launch that we saw today, it was like a fire hose of announcement. So how does the X-Series fit into the strategy with InterSight and hybrid cloud and this operating model that you're talking about? Right, so I think it goes hand in hand, right? The two pieces go together very well. So we have, you know, this idea of a single operating model that is definitely, you know, something that our customers demand, right? It's what we have to have. But at the same time, we need to solve the problems that Koss was talking about before. We need a single infrastructure to go along with that single operating model. So no longer do we need to have silos within the infrastructure that give us different operating models or different sets of benefits when you want infrastructure that can kind of do all of those configurations, all those applications. And then, you know, the operating model is very important because that's where we abstract the complexity that could come with just throwing all that technology at the infrastructure. So that, you know, this is, you know, the way that we think about it is the data center is not centered, right? It's no longer centered. Applications live everywhere. Infrastructure lives everywhere. And, you know, we need to have that consistent operating model, but we need to do things within the infrastructure as well to take full advantage, right? So we want all the SaaS benefits of a CICD model of, you know, the intersite can bring. We want all that, you know, proactive recommendation engine with the power of AI behind it. We want the connected support experience. We want all of that. We want to do it across a single infrastructure. And we think that that's how they tie together. That's why one or the other doesn't really solve the problem. But both together, that's why we're here. That's why we're super excited. So, Vikas, I'm going to make you laugh a little bit. When I was an analyst at IDC, I was deep in infrastructure. And then when I left, I was doing, I was working with application development heads. And like you said, infrastructure was just a, you know, roadblock. But, so, the target seek is when Cisco announced UCS a decade ago, I totally missed it. I didn't understand it. I thought it was Cisco getting into the traditional server business. And it wasn't until I dug in that I realized that your vision was really to transform infrastructure deployment and management and change them all. I was like, okay, I got that wrong. But, so, let's talk about the ecosystem and the joint development efforts that are going on there. X-Series, how does it fit into this converged infrastructure business that you've built and grown with partners? You got storage partners like NetApp and Pure. You got ISV partners in the ecosystem. We see Cohesity. It's been a while since we hung out with all these companies at Cisco Live, hopefully next year. But tell us what's happening in that regard. No, absolutely. I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Cisco Live next year, Dave. Absolutely. You brought up a very good point. UCS is about the ecosystem that it brings together. It's about making our customers bring up the entire infrastructure from the core foundational hardware all the way to the application level so that they can go off and running pretty quick. The converged infrastructure has been one of the cornerstones of the strategy as you pointed out in the last decade. And I'm very glad to share that converged infrastructure continues to be a very popular architecture for several enterprise applications even today. In fact, it is the preferred architecture for mission critical applications where performance, resiliency, latency, are the critical requirements. They are almost a de facto standards for large scale deployments of virtualization, business critical, databases and so forth. With X-Series, with our partnerships, with our storage partners, those architectures will absolutely continue and will get better. But in addition, it's a hybrid cloud world. So we are now bringing in the benefits of converged infrastructure to the world of hybrid cloud. We'll be supporting the hybrid cloud applications now with this CI infrastructure that we have built together with our strong partnership with the storage partners to deliver the same benefits to the new A's applications as well. Yeah, and that's what customers want. They want that cloud operating model, right? Go ahead, please. I was just going to say that the CI model will continue to thrive. It will transition, it will expand the use cases now for the newer use cases that we're beginning to say, Dave, absolutely. All right, great. Thank you for that. And James, I have said earlier today we heard this huge announcement, a lot of parts to it. We heard KD talk about this initiative is it's really computing built for the next decade. I mean, I like that because it shows some vision and that you've got a roadmap that you've thought through the coming changes in workloads and infrastructure management and some of the technology that you can take advantage of beyond just one or two product cycles. So, but I want to understand what you've done here specifically that you feel differentiates you from other competitive architectures in the industry. Sure, that's a great question, number one. Number two, I'm frankly a little bit concerned at times for customers in general, for our customers, customers in general, because if you look at what's in the market, these rinse and repeat systems that were effectively just rehashes of the same old design, right? That we've seen since before 2009 when we brought UCS to market. These are what we're seeing over and over and over again. That's not really gonna work anymore, frankly. And I think that people are getting lulled into a false sense of security by seeing those things continually put in the market. We've rethought this from the ground up because frankly, future-proofing starts now, right? If you're not doing it right today, future-proofing isn't even on your radar because you're not even today-proofed. So we've rethought the entire chassis, the entire architecture from the ground up. Okay, if you look at other vendors, if you look at other solutions in the market, what you'll see is things like management inside the chassis. That's a great example. Daisy chaining them together. Like who needs that? Who wants that? Like that kind of complexity is, first of all, it's ridiculous. Second of all, if you want to manage across clouds, you have to do it from the cloud, right? It's just common sense. You have to move management where it can have the scale and the scope that it needs to impact your entire domain, your world, which is much larger now than it was before. We're talking about true hybrid cloud here, right? So we had to solve certain problems that existed in the traditional architecture. I can't tell you how many times I heard, talk about the midplane is a great example. The midplane in a chassis is a limiting factor. It limits us on how much we can connect or how much bandwidth we have available to the chassis. It limits us on airflow and other things. So how do you solve that problem? Simple, just get rid of it. We took it out, right? It's no longer a problem. We designed an architecture that doesn't need it. It doesn't rely on it. No forklift upgrades. So as we start moving down the path of needing liquid cooling, or maybe we need to take advantage of some new high-performance low-latency fabrics, we can do that with almost no problem at all, right? So we don't have any forklift upgrades. Park your forklift on the side. You won't need it anymore because you can upgrade granularly. You can move along as technologies come into existence that maybe don't even exist today. They may not even be on our radar today to take advantage of. But I like to think of these technologies. They're really important to our customers. These are, we can call them disruptive technologies. The reality is that we don't want to disrupt our customers with these technologies. We want to give them these technologies so they can go out and be disruptive themselves, right? And this is the way that we've designed this from the ground up to be easy to consume and to take advantage of what we know about today and what's coming in the future that we may not even know about. So we think this is a way to give our customers that ultimate capability, flexibility, and future-proofing. I like that phrase, true hybrid cloud. It's one that we've used for years. But to me, this is all about that horizontal infrastructure that can support that vision of what true hybrid cloud is. You could support the mission critical applications. You can develop on the system and you can support a variety of workloads locked into one narrow stovepipe. And that does have legs. Vikas and James, thanks so much for coming on the program, great to see you. Thank you, appreciate the time. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in digital event coverage.