 From San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. And now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for theCUBE and the director set. I'm John Furrier and this is our flagship program, theCUBE, where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're excited here, day three, we're wrapping up. Sashi Kiran is the senior director for data center and cloud for Cisco. Great to see you, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. So we've been having a conversation on CrowdChat over this week, kind of a sub theme, if you will, kind of a back channel, but on the hashtag at VMworld around policy based programmable networks. This is kind of like the topic that no one's talking about, but everyone's talking about. You know, DevOps is great, infrastructure as code is a big term that's been kicked around and DevOps is the center of the action. But there's a lot of stuff that's DevOps oriented in the Ops side as networks. SDN is a big part of that. You guys have a big presence, big push. Jim McHugh from Cisco is on talking about the leadership in blades, UCS. So you guys are actually doing some damage quietly out there, getting the leadership position on servers. But I got to ask you, SDN networks, that's your wheelhouse. Where are we with this scene here at VMworld, SDN? We talked about ACI. People want programmable networks. What's your take on this and what is Cisco's approach? Yeah, so first of all, thanks for setting the CrowdChat up. It was very interesting to participate, see some of the conversation threats that were going. And me and my team really enjoyed that. For us, what we're seeing here is really networks being a pretty central theme amongst customers. And more importantly, how it contributes to the rest of infrastructure. As these conversations morph into what's happening with cloud, what's happening with DevOps, it's really about making it a lot more agile, consumable. And that's where I guess the notion of infrastructure as code comes in. So from a Cisco perspective, about three, four years back, we said, look, there are going to be multiple approaches to SDN. Let's not just caught up with what the definition is because no one single person's definition is unique there. Let's try to map it to different use cases, deployment models. And in many ways, our SDN strategy has also gone down that path where we have said, look, there are customers that are going to be natively leveraging the programmability within the network infrastructure. So how do you make that a lot more open, a lot more programmable? And then there are others that are using the overlay controller approach and we have solutions there as well. And then we have solutions like ACI, which really brings together the whole infrastructure components, including the policy-based controller in a fairly integrated manner and makes it a lot more consumable and easy to roll out automation at scale. So eventually we don't get down the path of just one approach to SDN. We look at these multiple flavors and then map those accordingly. Agility and resilience is a really big part of the network conversation. And this is kind of where it seems to be going. There's no one-size-fits-all. That's right. You know, beauty's in the eye of the beholder, depending upon how people engineer their network. So that's kind of been one standard conversation we've been having, because it confuses me, wait a minute, I want to just point at something and say that's the reference architecture. There could be some reference architectures there, but ultimately it's all engineers. So I've got to ask you, could you define what ACI is for folks out there? Because we had some folks in the crowd chat who were kind of getting aware of it, looking at NSX, ACI. What is ACI? Describe quickly for the folks that aren't really familiar with it. There's obviously an acronym from Cisco, but explain what it is, the concept, the benefits, and the approach, and what's the religion behind ACI? Is there a certain approach? Is there a, you know, obviously Cisco, you have your own religion on networking. We know that, but what is ACI? So ACI, you know, stands for application-centric infrastructure. So fundamentally, if you peel the onion, it's really about making the networks much more open, programmable, and application-centric. Traditionally, if you take the clock back a few years ago, we've had these black holes exist between infrastructure and applications. The applications have largely assumed infinite network bandwidth, and the networks have been agnostic to the applications that run on them. You mentioned two things about resiliency and agility. Networks have always been fairly resilient, robust, but what's the need of the day today is how do you make them fast, agile, and more responsive to the needs of applications? So that's where ACI comes in, because at the heart of it, it adopts a policy-driven approach where you have a controller, which allows different subject matter experts within an organization to define policies in terms of how the infrastructure components need to behave, and it's aligned with the needs of the applications that run on top. And so by bringing this in a centralized way, providing a single plane of glass, if you will, and at the same time, really making the networks much more secure, open, you're able to automate things at scale. And that is what's contributing to agility today, because everybody's around ruthless automation. Automate what you can, and then just scale things out. And that's where ACI is a solution that's a fundamental SD in architecture, if you will. So how do customers manage it? I want you to tie into this approach, because the first thing I would do as a customer, we'd be like, whoa, man, new thing from Cisco. So the first thing I think about is rip and replace. Is it a rip and replace? Is it incremental? Is there migration tools? How does customers manage the process of looking at this? Because application-centric, great positioning, got to give you props for that. That's what everyone wants. They want applications to be in charge and push down policy to the network and have the network be responsive versus the other way around. The world's flipped upside down. So how does a customer get there? So it's actually an elegant new operational model. And it also looks at, if somebody's using networks in a traditional three-tier architecture, it allows you to bring the new switches in and adhere to that architecture. They're going down the path of a spine leaf, don't want to go down the path of bringing a controller in or going down the path of ACI. It allows them to do that. But at the same time, ACI and the controller can be brought in as a software add-on, assuming you have the underlying switching infrastructure in place. And it also goes beyond just the Cisco solution because today no single company is an island. And the more we can open it up and embrace some of the open ecosystem that's around, that's when it becomes much more of a powerful value proposition for customers. And we have about 36 ecosystem partners that have subscribed to the ACI model and it's growing. And it allows them to come under the same policy model and from a customer perspective, it's really the heterogeneity of the infrastructure that's now coming under the same policy-driven umbrella. So these are things that are resonating quite well across different segments of customers. Today we have close to a thousand customers that are running it in ACI mode. And it's obviously growing across different verticals. And we'll see. It's a year since it became generally available and I expect more traction and more production use cases to come out in the near future. Can you share numbers of deployments of ACI? Is it large? Is it early adopter mode? Are people fully producing product? We have people across all different stages of deployment externally. We've had several customers step up and share their success stories. For example, Semantec for example, we've had Pulse and we've had several of our service providers, Sun Guard. Many of them have really come back and said, hey, this is what resonates with me. There are some that really like the automation capability, others that like the way that you can roll out patches even rolling out patches from where upgrades is a big task. It's manually driven in the previous era. And a lot of that gets taken off and if you look at today's IT scenario, everybody has flat budget, flat resources but you're expected to move fast. And so that's where things like ACI come and help compress the time to application if you will. And it's not just standing up an application but looking at the day one, day two operations and being able to troubleshoot it which is where the value at. I love this conversation because we've had a couple of crowd chats with Google Cloud guys on Cloud Native. VMware has done a crowd chat on Cloud Native. You guys will probably end up doing one on Cloud Native but Cloud Native came up in our crowd chat with respect to ACI. Photon announcement was this week. That seems to tie together. How do you guys fit into all that Cloud Native, Photon and just general industry trends around the area? Yeah, so the whole notion of the Cloud Native is to be able to be agile and to fail safe and to develop applications that are native to the Cloud. At the same time, the dichotomies we recognize, IT organizations are sort of in this dual mode where they have to preserve what's working. A lot of the traditional applications which Gartner calls as mode one is still going to be around for the next five to seven years even as these new mode two applications, the Cloud Native applications come about. So it's a balancing act where you're flying a ship while bringing in these new applications at the same time. The Cloud Native applications to a large extent are controlled in many cases by the line of business. And so this architecture needs to be fundamentally flexible enough to support both the traditional as was the Cloud Native. Look at the container models. Look at OpenStack, DevOps, Affinity. So ACI sort of is onboarding a lot of these things and mapping into those capabilities. So we were talking on Monday with the crowd on the VMworld hashtag. And Jeremy Oakley I think is with Cisco, he made an interesting comment. I'm going to read it to you. I want to get a conversation around that. He said, seeing lots of interest in containers but the reality is not everyone is just going to completely switch to them. A hybrid application profile with VMs and containers is going to be the norm and people will learn what's best for the customers that they serve. What does he mean by that? Is he saying hybrid applications is the norm or containers are going to be the norm? Vice versa, what do you think? What is he saying in that comment? My interpretation is that there is going to be this dichotomy that's going to exist. Nothing's going to shift overnight. Things aren't a sprint here. It's going to be a marathon. People have invested in the networks, infrastructures, data centers. And a lot of our customers are figuring out how do they go down the path of building the private cloud or which applications do they put into a public cloud environment? And can they get their hybrid presence where they have this consistency? Security is a big deal. Manageability, visibility across this hybrid footprint. And so that's the two things that I was saying. You need to really be in a position to juggle because you are trying to satisfy these two stakeholders, the traditional IT organization as well as the lines of business that are working with their wallets as well. So NSX has been getting traction. It's almost just rolling thunder. And it's pretty impressive. They've got their milestones kicking up and they've got more customers. That's what they're saying, showing the numbers, revenues up. What is that about? Is that real deployments? You have comments on NSX because NSX and ACI are kind of jockeying together in the same space here. How do customers make sense of this? I mean, is there a competition? Is it frenemies, as Carl Aschenbach would say? I mean, there's a lot of frenemies here in the ecosystem. So how do customers make sense of this? So NSX is certainly one approach to SDN predicated on network virtualization. As far as we're concerned, NSX still requires an underlying infrastructure to run its software. And we're seeing many instances where customers that are exploring NSX are also coming back and saying, hey, can I bring the Cisco infrastructure underneath? And as far as ACI is concerned, we really look at NSX as being yet another application that runs on it. If there are VMware customers that want to choose NSX, then the best infrastructure that it can run on is ACI. And so in that sense, we're sort of agnostic and we can probably make NSX run better, if you will. So one of the top conversations we had on Monday was a comment that I made on Twitter. It said, I said, Bill Fathers spoke about the challenge with networking for deploying applications in private, hybrid, and public cloud. How are you at Cisco facilitating deploying applications in hybrid clouds? No, I didn't say unified because you guys had that word unified in your UCS system. But no, in hybrid clouds in general. How are you guys facilitating deployments in hybrid cloud? Yeah, what I liked about the keynote here at VMworld was they did talk about the unified hybrid cloud vision. And in many ways, it's similar to what Cisco has been articulating over the last several years. The unified data center has always been predicated on unification with convergence. But even in the context of cloud, we've adopted the strategy of the intercloud, which is a cloud of clouds. And it really shouldn't matter whether it's your public, private, or hybrid environment, can you bring the degree of consistency, visibility, security, manageability. Fundamentally, that's the value proposition of what intercloud is. And what VMware was talking about yesterday is very similar to what we have articulated and where we are further along the last couple of years. So they're following on your narrative around interclouds. I think it's kind of seen with that. The vision certainly seems to be aligned with what we have stated. And obviously, different vendors offer different kinds of solutions. I guess we've got a couple of minutes left. I want to get your personal perspective. Take your Cisco hat off for a second. Put your industry hat on, someone who's a subject matter expert in networking. Dave Vellante and I were talking with Lou Tucker and Stu on theCUBE recently. Lou Tucker, obviously famous engineer, technologist with Cisco now. Formerly a son, great inventor. He's an involved Nopistak. We're talking about interclouds. And we were just kind of riffing on the concept of internet working really made Cisco. I mean, routing obviously made Cisco, but internet working connecting subnets together became a really big growth of the Ethernet boom. Are we on the same cusp of that kind of new revolution? Is interclouding a mega trend? Do you see that? I mean, take your Cisco hat off. Just kind of someone who's in the trenches. You know about policy-based, it's all networking stuff, right? Is interclouding going to be a big thing? It is certainly aspirational and it's something that we're viewing in the same way as the original evolution of the internet. And in reality, it's a very complex thing to achieve because it isn't just between any one vendor or within the same hypervisor stack. Intercloud really becomes very powerful proposition when it's sort of this multi-vendor, multi-hypervisor, any cloud, public, private, managed, any service provider, any device. So it's some ways to go, whether it's for Cisco or whether it's for VMware or anybody else. But I think it's the right aspirational vision for leaders in the industry like Cisco and VMware to aim for. And what resonated with me is it means that we're talking is the same set of customers who are providing all of us the same feedback. And it's going to be a really- Customers are in charge, ultimately. They define everything. But you guys have to bring something to the table and the tooling and the standardization is key. I mean, if you have standards, then you can have different approaches on how people engineer that. So is that the bottleneck, is standards? Is it more saluting the flag of some sort of standard? I mean, you don't have to have standard proprietary stacks. You could have just open standards. There will be a combination of all of these. There'll be standardized building blocks. There'll be open source building blocks. There'll be community-led efforts. And there will be proprietary innovations. And eventually, the system has to be malleable enough to recognize these different contributions and reconcile that. That's probably when it's the most impactful. Yeah, I mean, I was talking with George Gilbert, our big data analyst earlier today. And we're quoting some Paul Moritz quotes from many, many years ago. And talking about the PC revolution and networking is like, no one really cares what's inside an Intel processor because it just works. So there's an abstraction layer and a hardening of proprietary. You could be proprietary at some level, but do people really give a crap? I mean, if it works, it works well. I'm a developer and I don't really want to get involved in the nuances of what's underneath. That's a good thing. If this thing is on top of it. Absolutely. So open interfaces are a really big thing on that account because many developers want the interfaces to be open. And if you can innovate on the hardware or the silicon underneath and still make it open, it's more goodness for them. Okay, final question. What's your take on VMworld this year? Obviously, some are saying, oh, not a lot of content, some are saying, we're seeing a vision from VMware. They're executing it, but clearly Pat Gelsinger laid out a long-term vision wearables brought in all the top trends that we're watching kind of laid out. Hey, don't think myopically quarter to quarter. Think holistically. It's a revolution, globalization. Is that fantasy? Is it VMware trying to cover up that there's no big game-changing announcement? Or is it really just a transitional market factor right now? I think it's a bit of both. Personally, looking at it outside, and I view VMware as at an inflection point, they are evolving as a company to get into different paths, if you will. And so it's at this time that you need to lay out the longer-term visions, which aren't product-centric. The hypervisor is certainly becoming a commodity, if you will. VMware is also getting exposed to containers, open stack, all of which are bringing in different selection criteria within customer environments. So it's important for VMware to be able to really stitch together these and convey a longer-term vision. And I actually thought Pat and team did a really good job. I was thrilled to see some of the audiences here, almost 25,000 or so. It was a huge amount of interest, and I wish them the very best. Yeah, we love VMware. We do a great job, and there's a lot of opportunities for those guys. Final question for you, final, final question. What's it like at Cisco right now? John Chambers, legend in the industry, finally stepping down, but he's going to be vice chairman, which means he's active. He'll still be kind of hanging around. Great, he's great with customers. But also, Cisco just really was transitional as a company because they're such a big player as part of the internet, obviously Ethernet, and obviously today, all the innovations at Cisco. But the company seems to need a new image. That's kind of my external perspective. Big install base, huge technologist there. What's it like in Cisco? What can you share to the folks watching on what's it like there? Is there a new refresh going on with the mindset? Is it a new vibe? What's the mojo? Is it the same old Cisco with the twist? What's going on? Yeah, John's the executive chairman right now, and Chuck's taken very firm charge at the helm. And personally, both as an insider of Cisco, as well as somebody who's looked at the company from outside before I joined it. There's a lot of change that's happening, and it's interesting to see change happen in a big company environment. There's certainly new talent and leadership at the top. We've had a new CTO command. We've had new chief of staff command and new CMO. And some of these changes will take time to see what the impact is, but Chuck has brought in a sense of urgency in. And in reality, I think Cisco traditionally has its strength with the networking space, but we've made tremendous strides with compute, big data, and all of these things. And what is happening right now is how we tie these elements together, the whole IoT conversation, analytics, cloud, big data. End to end. End to end, right? So, eventually. I mean, the edge of the network, the edge of the network, which is the term you guys used to use all the time, used to be a device, now it's wearables. Yeah, exactly. And so we don't have this notion of the data center being the central location with perimeter security. Data center is where your data and applications are, and they're everywhere. So that's the whole new world we're all trying to adapt to very quickly and it's going to be interesting. I think it's exciting to watch. I think it's going to be not a pivot, but a transformation for Cisco because the edge of the network is now consumer. And it's going to be fun to see how you guys do that. And it's always been fun to watch Cisco debate itself into moving up the stack, because your bread and butters, down in the lower part of the stack, networking. Cisco systems has been integrating different components and even as it moves up the stack, I think the differentiation you'll see from Cisco is how it integrates with what's at the bottom as well. Shashi, final, final, final question. Is hybrid cloud a reality? I mean, is it an outcome? Is it a product? You've got public, we've got private, you've got on-prem data centers. I mean, is hybrid cloud actually anything other than cloud? Hybrid is really giving customers choice of where they want to place their application workload, how they want to optimize the delivery. And it's very fast becoming a reality. I would say a majority of customers are very keen to adopt a hybrid approach. And they want to have control of certain applications, workloads, but they also want to put something else and leverage the ubiquity of the public cloud. And they want choice. And what we're seeing is they don't want to be stuck up with a workload that's put in a public cloud and not have the option of bringing it back. And at the same time, not balloon up the IT organization so it becomes a bottleneck for application rollout. Shashi, thanks so much for coming on, sharing your insight. And I want to thank you and your team for really engaging CrowdChat on Monday and yesterday. A lot of good content. Go to CrowdChat.net and just search for Cisco. You'll see the transcripts from those thought leaders on CrowdChat. And again, great, great chat. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate our director set. We'll be back with more here in Moscone in San Francisco after the short break. Thank you, John.