 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain. We are live at Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE. My co-host Stu Miniman, analyst at wikibond.com. Our next two guests is Siva Subakumar who is the senior director, data center solutions at Cisco and Lee Howard, chief technologist, global industry solutions and alliances at NetApp. Great partnership here to talk about the tech involved in the partnership. Obviously in the industry it's pretty well known that NetApp's doing really well with Cisco. Congratulations. You guys have been enabling great partner dynamics lately but all the action's been on the intersection between arrays, better, faster, cheaper storage, but also enabling software-defined stuff value. What's the tech involved in the partnership? Why is it going so well? Lee, can you start? I think offering choice out there is the best thing that we can do. You've got data fabric from a NetApp perspective, is that super interconnected highway and as many on-ramps as we can build for folks to get on that highway. The more successful you're going to be able to see. I mean, the IDC numbers speak for themselves. We've got a really prolific double-digit growth. I think we were at 56% last quarter listed together on there. I mean, that's how tight this partnership's been and I think leveraging that combined portfolio has given us a very competitive offering out there in the industry. Siva, I want to get your thoughts because obviously Cisco, we've been, Stu and I love talking about networking in Cisco in particular because the old days was just provisioning the network and good stuff happens. Apps get built, things get done. But with the cloud, you see the shift where you've got DevOps culture, you've got cloud native happening. So the real enabling technologies have to be beyond the network. So you guys have been successful with UCS and a variety of other things. What's the key things that's making you guys key partners in the ecosystem? What are you guys truly enabling? Is it network programmability? What's the secret sauce from Cisco's standpoint? You know, if you look at the way data center has evolved in the last decade or so, the way customers are consuming technology is much more at a platform level. They want things simplified. They want to, as you just said, the innovation that's happening in the above the layer in terms of the software stack and use cases is just tremendous. They really want the platform to become simple and that's what cloud did to you anyways. So that level of simplification, that level of optimization, but still a best of breed is what got us together. And we have continued to build world-class platforms that started one way, started at mainly looking at virtualization and those plays over time. But in the last four, five years or so, the amount of innovations we have brought on top of a FlexPod, which is our joint solution together, has been right at the cutting edge of where technology is going and where applications are landing. And that in a very large way has become the key for the success between the two of us. We had Todd Brandon on earlier and he validated our thesis and Wikibon actually had our report came out last year in the middle of the year called True Private Cloud. The only research analyst firm that actually got this one right in my opinion, which validated by you guys is that, and certainly any Jassy would argue that everything's moving to the cloud. Tomorrow, certainly there's some cloud migration, there's some stuff in the public cloud, no problem. What Wikibon did is they looked at the True Private Cloud numbers, meaning that the action with the spend is and where the buyers are doing the most work, both refreshing and retooling is on-premises. Because they're actually changing the operating model on-premises now as a way, as a sequence to hybrid and then maybe full multi-cloud or full public cloud, whatever they want to do. So that being said, Lee, what does that mean? I mean, because certainly I understand what a cloud operating model is, but when I'm talking about storage and networking, what does that look like? Is that a full transformation? How long is that going to take? Your thoughts on comment on that? We're seeing, you saw in the keynote this morning, them referencing brand new titles and new personnel, new human capital that's coming in. And I think that is both your enabling and your barring factor to changing how you're consuming resources on-site. Cloud architects, as they're coming into prominent enterprise architects, I think we're getting to a point where there's enough of a intuition to the software that's enabling those consumption trends to shift that it's now a way for not just those that have the inside information, but it's something that's consumable for the masses. And so I think 2018, you guys hit on a DevOps highly versatile model going forward and I think multi-cloud is going to be the right answer. Roles are changing. Roles are changing and we have been seeking to be that technology provider that regardless of where you're at in that journey, you're able to leverage our portfolio to be able to do it. Does the product change? The product, the tenants behind the product, not so much, but I think the way that it's being leveraged does end up changing. Siva, your thoughts on this? You know, if you start to think about the earlier generation of cloud, it was mainly seen as a capacity argumentation, mainly on the IS and so it really started people to think that everything is moving to cloud. But if you look at the innovation that happens in the cloud, the cloud in itself is a massive ecosystem and people want to go do that. So there is a huge reason why the cloud is successful, but that's not necessarily just taking everything on-prem and putting, that's not the trend. What you really see is customers now starting to reach that level of maturity to say, hey, you know, there is a tremendous value in what I can do in on-prem, the data gravity and the latency and those things. So you agree with the true private cloud report then? The on-prem action is where? Oh, we continue to see that from our customers, from UCS adoption and things like that. We absolutely see that is real as well. Let's go back to the data center for a second because some people look at it and they're like, oh, well, CI's been happening now for, gosh, almost a decade now. HCI has a lot of buzz out there. What I want to hear what you're hearing from customers because first of all, I mean, what we see is, there's still the majority of people still building their own, they're taking the pieces, they might, you know, FlexPod is a little bit different than, you know, say Hyperconverged from a single SKU, but you've still got to build your own CI, you know, big partnership. You're still huge revenue. HCI has the both Cisco and NetApp have pieces there. Where are the customers today? Why is CI still like a meaningful part of the discussion today? Well, I think it all comes down to scale and how you want to be able to interface. You know, what do you want your data center to be like today? How are you staffed and proficient at implementing a solution and where do you want that data center to go tomorrow? I think CI and HCI absolutely have a place together in the data center, but as we see RFPs fundamentally shift to reflect what the new way that infrastructure's being consumed, a cookie cutter approach that you get with a lot of HCI's isn't always going to be the answer. You want to have that full modularity, that full flexibility. I mean, it's in the title, it's FlexPod. You want to be able to have that versatility to address not just, you know, the initial scoping project, but, you know, with Flash-enabled data centers, assets are staying on the books longer and longer, those depreciation schedules are getting stretched out. And so having the versatility not just to live in today's operating environment, but the operating environment of tomorrow, I think, is what's really driving that mainstay of CI. Yeah, Siva, we heard in the keynote this morning a lot of discussion about multi-cloud and management. Talk about how Cisco and NetApp, how do you view those together? Where do you go to market together, co-engineer, things like that? Absolutely. If you guys, you know, sort of look at what we did in the FlexPod, we created what we would fundamentally call as a core platform for data center. And that was the biggest success. You know, we had a lot of workloads and use cases. But in the last two to three years, what we have both done, is individually we have portfolio products that allow a cloud journey. Cisco is a big proponent of multi-cloud and the journey to cloud, and providing customer the right platform so they can pick and choose when to go to cloud and how to go to cloud. And there are similar assets from NetApp. What we have done is we have built FlexPod solutions that builds on top of, that leverages the cloud center products, NetApp's data fabric, some of their technology that's co-location within the Equinox and so on and so forth. What that has allowed is FlexPod as a platform has blossomed as the cloud has grown because we now offer the choice. That also brought more customers to realize, well these guys really provide me the journey to cloud model. And there is more and more new solution that we are building that continues to drive that mindset from both companies. Look, you want to build on that? Yeah, and providing that operational excellence to where you're able to come in and leverage these assets, not just day zero, but through the entire lifespan of that asset. And that's the quality of life improvements is a big thing from NetApp and Cisco's perspective is we're coming together and we're planning what the future state's going to look like. It's not just, hey, this is the specific drive capacity you're putting in. That's yesterday's infrastructure. Tomorrow is all about what quality of life, how much time can we give back to those end users out there? So I have a question for you guys both. Lee, we'll start with you. You got the storage, compute and switching. You guys are leaders in those areas. What's next? We're driving the partnership. Can you talk about how you present the partnership with Cisco to customers? What's in it for me? What's new? What's fresh? What's the deal? The conversation we have out there, a lot of times there's perception issues that we are the old guard of technology. Flexplot's been around seven going on eight years. And they say, what's fresh out there? Well, we're so much more than just the infrastructure piece. It's a combined portfolio. And so Cisco recently announced their partnership with Google Cloud. We have our NFS native on Azure going forward. And so leveraging those better together stories and each other's Rolodex to be able to come in and truly engineer next generation solutions, that's what's getting people excited. How are you going to set me up for success tomorrow, not just how are we going to be successful today on today's technology? How are you guys successful today? How do you talk about the relationship? Because they have a unique capabilities been around the block for a while in the storage business. I mean, you look at the history of NetApp, very interesting, very engineering oriented, very customer focused. 25 years. What's your position on this? I think you have two companies who have a tremendous technology focus in building. But what keeps this partnership going together is easily our customers. We're not young anymore in the partnership. We have over 10 billion dollars of install-based customers. We have over 8,000 customers. And just keeping up with those customers and providing them the journey, however they want to go is absolutely becomes our, it's our prerogative to make these customers successful in wherever they want to go next. And that's a big driver for how we look at innovation. We continue to provide the capabilities that allows our customers to continue their journey. And at the same time, we bring our innovation to make this platform successful. So I want to put you on the spot here, both of you guys. I know Stu's got a question, we've got a couple minutes left. Kubernetes has put a line in the sand and separates the two worlds of developers. App developers, really just looking at as a fabric of resource, they're creative, doing cool things. Then you've got the network, storage, software engineering going on under the hood. It's like a car. You're now an engine, you've got to work together. What do you guys do specifically to make that work, make the engine really powerful? In the context of Kubernetes, we are, we joined. Under the hood, what's under the hood? Kubernetes is the line there, but you've got to sit with NetApp, you've got to make the engine powerful. You guys are working together. What's the sound bite for the customers? Why NetApp, once this go together? So if you look back at our containerization and microservices, that journey, we certainly, again, same logic, same model, we are building an ecosystem there. We are developing joint solution that optimizes how Kubernetes and Cisco and Google have made several announcements on how we are bringing innovation at infrastructure automation level, at network scale level, that allows a massively scalable container environment or a Kubernetes environment to be deployed on top of a Cisco infrastructure. And there are NetApp's innovation around Kubernetes, around building the plugins for how the plugins interact with the storage subsystem that allows us to say, if you are deploying a Kubernetes environment, if you are deploying the best of breed, you certainly need the platform that understands this and scales with that. All right, Lee, your differentiation for that power engine under the hood with Cisco. Infrastructure is code. I mean, that's what we are together. And I don't think that across the competitive landscape that they are, everybody else is really embracing it in such a fashion. It's speaking the language that these developers are wanting to do, and we're marrying that up with the core tenants that made us an IT powerhouse together. Yeah, it was the developer angle, John, you've been doing so many of these together, absolutely where we wanted to go. It's still not like the great shows that we do the cloud native, got Kubernetes, we do under the hood. This is a big journey for customers. There's a lot of fun out there, and they want to know one thing, who's going to be around in the future? And having the partnerships is really key. You guys have been very successful. I'll give you guys the final word, each of you to share, what customers should expect from the relationship. Siva, we'll start with you. I think the continued greatness, continued commitment to making customers successful with the innovation that keeps them worry much more about the above the layer, the application, the business critical elements, and make the infrastructure as simple and as versatile as possible is absolutely our commitment. I boil it down to the human capital out there, the human element, and that is bringing conviction to your decisions. We've both been here multiple decades together in our partnership. FlexPod's coming up on a decade. It's conviction in knowing that you can rely on the lifeblood of your business being secure with us together. Well, congratulations. Certainly the developers going to be testing the hardware into the hood, and we've got a DevOps culture developing all on-prem and in the cloud hybrid. So it's going to be interesting in a couple of years. Interesting times we live in. Lee Howard, chief technologist with NetApp, and Siva Kumar, our senior director. Katie Sinners here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, live from Barcelona at Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More live coverage from theCUBE after this short break.