 Hello everybody, welcome to theCUBE's live coverage here in Cisco Live in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. We're both industry analysts here on the ground, Dave, getting all the action. I've been covering Cisco Live for 13 years up close. I know you've done longer, even going back to your IDC days. What a big transition. This is a hallmark moment for Cisco. We just came back from the keynotes. You wrote a post before the event that got a lot of criticism, a little bit too harsh. I thought it was right on point. The Cisco team was a little bit looking at, whoa, whoa, turns out you were right. The post was a great setup for what actually you thought they needed to address in your critical analysis. Cisco rose to the occasion. You had Chuck Robbins here on stage and the brain trust, Liz Santoni, J2 Patel, Jonathan Davidson and the new CMO, Carrie Palin. I mean, all CUBE alumni is except for Chuck Robbins. We got to get Chuck off. Chuck's got to come on the CUBE. You know, John, he's talking about, I got some criticism, but I got it from both sides. I got some, some people said it was too easy on Cisco. Others said they thought it was too harsh. So that I think is a recognition of a good, good balance post. Because we told both sides, Zeus Caravalla, a friend of the CUBE, helped us do that. Sort of a member of the CUBE's inner circle, if you will. But so the point that we made, John, was to challenge Cisco to simplify. You know, bust down those silos and you heard that today. They talked about their networking cloud. They talked about their security cloud. They talked about full stack of observability, weaving thousand eyes throughout the portfolio and really trying to dramatically attack complexity. Which as you well know, John, is one of the big challenges in the IT industry generally and with Cisco's portfolio. So I give them high marks on really nailing that complexity and simplification message. And now it's got to play out over the next several years. They got to, they basically, in my view, John, I want you to think about this. To me, they announced three super clouds. They announced the networking super cloud, a security super cloud and a full stack of observability super cloud which sort of weaves through the other two. Now over the next couple of years, we're going to see those things come together. We're here in the pop-up CUBE here on the floor. This is one of our sets. You've seen the pop-up CUBE before. You've seen the bigger CUBE. Of course, if there's no space, we'll do whatever it takes to get the story. That's the way we roll on the CUBE. But Dave, we've been getting into the more of the research analyst side of it. As we get the data in, what I find really compelling is that, but I can see the end path for the game plan for Cisco, the end game. They embrace the cloud, okay? And they're going to do what Microsoft kind of did, but in a different kind of way. Microsoft had an install base, had a very low stock price, had no cloud action at all, all proprietary, .NET, no Linux, no open source. Satya Netell came in, embraced the open source, embraced the market, leaned into the market forces, turned, made a tailwind out of it, and pulled their entire install base over. Cisco is doubling down on their networking and focusing like a laser on security. Now, what they didn't talk about was the data underneath the security, so it's network plus security. It's infused in all of their conversations. So, they got a really strong manager team, like I said, all CUBE alumni's. Jonathan Davidson knows his networking, Liz knows the tech, and you got JT Patel's collaboration and security. They got Tom Gillis from VMware, another CUBE alumni. So, Cisco's management team is pumping. They got fresh marketing blood with Kerry Palin. They got a great focus. And I got to tell you, they're more unified now than I've ever seen Cisco, because they're in a position to not just move up the stack, but change the stack dynamics to be very cloud-friendly, cloud-first, and support on-premises, and support the edge. So, to me, the world is their oyster right now because if they can just get out in the marketplace, pull their install base, listen to the use cases that matter, not get dogmatic on some of the old muscle behavior of box, feature, you know, to networking, because that's their safety blanket. They got to double down on their networking, and I think multi-cloud will be the home run for them. If you look at what they're doing with multi-cloud, they're poise for the super cloud trend that we're documenting. They got a network cloud, they got a security cloud, and it's about time, in my opinion, that Cisco did this. So, a couple things. So, not too far into Chuck Robbins' tenure, but far enough that he could sort of get a lay of the land. He reorganized the executive leadership team, and you're starting to see that, the impact of that take effect. And I think, I mean, I wasn't there, obviously, but I think he got him into the room and said, listen, you guys got to work together, okay? Let's stop the sort of friction and cross organizational friction. We are going to work together. We're going to focus on customer outcomes. You heard today, the real focus, not so much more on features. They were joking, tongue in cheek. We love features. We're really on customer outcomes. Okay, it sounds like bromide, but that's a mindset. You know this well as a product person. You know, it's enticing to build features. Now, a couple things. Security's about a billion dollar business for Cisco. Okay, we're talking about a company that's nearly 60 billion dollar run rate company. So, massive upside for security. What I really liked about what I heard today is they're simplifying security in the following ways. If you think about how sort of on-prem security works, and when you're accessing resources on-prem, you're in a VPN, you're looking at IP addresses, but when you're talking to cloud and cloud native, right, it services. They're making that, I guess opaque. They're making that invisible to the customer, which is I think a huge, huge trend. Now, in security they got a big presence, but nobody has double-digit market share. Maybe Microsoft, that's sort of debatable. But they're up against Palo Alto Networks. They're up against CrowdStrike and XDR. They're up against Zscaler, Octa. These are sort of pure play companies that have certainly from a stock standpoint in the last year outperformed Cisco. Cisco's got a much broader base. But as Zs Caravella points out, Cisco throws off more cash in a quarter than these guys throw off revenue in the entire year. And so you got to put that into context. So Cisco's in actually really interesting position. I think the challenge now is, obviously they got to deliver on this, what we call super cloud promise, that simplification, and they got to bring those pieces together. The other thing we heard, sort of talking last night in the hallway talk, really, Meraki is a key, right? And you know this, Meraki and Catalyst, sort of different management environments, bringing those together under the really, the Meraki is kind of a linchpin of that networking. Meraki is a key linchpin because it's very cloud native friendly, the development cycles are different than the old Catalyst. Catalyst's kind of like the old school, like it's a reliable, you know, bus. It's like a- But kind of waterfall approach. Well, it's just a reliable old school Cisco. Old reliable TCP IP, as they say. It's the bread and butter, it's bread and butter. But Meraki gives them that edge. With ThousandEyes integration, ThousandEyes is super critical to the success of their observability and their core products that kind of pull together in the portfolio. But what I thought was more compelling than just that, Dave, was the fact that they brought some sizzle to the steak that they laid out. And the sizzle was, you had a very AWS vibe. We're announcing this, we're announcing that, like a lot of slew of announcements, which is, you know, Cisco, huge. They don't usually do that. The second thing is, there's three points that I took away, but I think it's a net positive for the, I call it the long game, Cisco. Network at AI scale, Silicon and networking chops that they have, they got both Silicon and networking and networking software chops, and AI-enabled security solutions. Those three areas came out in every single conversation. They're developing the portfolio with the eye on those three things, network at AI scale, Silicon and networking software, well, Silicon chips and networking software, and AI-enabled security solutions. So, yeah, really, really phenomenal. And that sort of broke it down. So, in review of the keynotes, let's go through that. Liz came out on stage, so Chuck Robbins did the whole, you know, thing there, you know, kicked it off. Liz came on, innovation, observability, API ecosystems, quantum. Quantum, I spent a lot of time on quantum. And she didn't talk about cloud-native, but she teased it out as headroom for the future of developers. So, I thought Liz hit the innovation angle. And then- Well, that's her swim lane, right? She's doing a lot of the innovation stuff, right? I mean, not, they're all doing innovation, but she's doing the advanced innovation, right? That's under her group, whereas Jonathan Davidson has the networking, G2 Patel has security and collaboration, which is kind of a weird combo, but they kind of gave it to him because he's product guy, right? Well, J2's a platform guy. Yeah, well- I think that's a good fit for him. I think giving just J2 just collaboration, he's strong enough manager to have more meat there. Well, to your point, we talked about this at RSA. The key takeaway at RSA, and you nailed this, was the platformatization, right, of security. It's a platformatization of everything. It's not just about the features. And you know, I just want to come back to the AI play. They were not like AI washing by any means. You didn't hear that from them, but at the same time, this is the year of AI. So to me, Cisco's AI play is a no-brainer. They're going to inject AI into their networks, into security, into collaboration, into observability. They're just going to inject it into their entire portfolio. That is a sure bet that they'll win. Well, they didn't, they didn't AI wash anything. They actually delivered real meat on the bone. I'll give you an example. J2 addressed this. He said, we have AI use cases for configuration and for networking. You kind of brought this up in the executive questioning. That's table stakes. They actually created a product, the SOC assistant. So they actually created a new product with AI. Something that's more operational, but yet relevant. Security-powered SOC. Security-powered SOC. It should be really interesting to see how that plays with MSSPs. I think they're going to absorb it as partners. It could be a little bit, could be a little bit threatening to some companies. I can think about like an Arctic Wolf, right? Who actually does that or all these dozens of MSSPs. But I really like that. And Cisco's, as you know, very partner-friendly from a go-to-market standpoint. I thought, I thought- It was called the SOC assistant. Yeah, the SOC assistant. Right, AI-powered SOC assistant. And there's some good taglines. I love this one. If they said, if it's connected, it's protected. No more swivel chair. Days are over. And to me, that's the super cloud narrative. I mean, they don't use the term super cloud, but it's all about creating a common experience across, on-prem, into the cloud, across clouds. I don't know if that stretches out to the edge. We heard from Dell a couple weeks ago that their storage in the cloud, they're what they call a project alpine, does stretch out to the edge. The project alpine and project frontier with a common storage layer. I don't know if that's the case here. If they're going to have a common experience out to the edge as well. Edge is ugly right now, right? I mean, we're talking to an expert last night at dinner about the edge and it's a little funky. It's not simple, right? It's unclear right now. It's very verticalized. So I think they're smart to be careful about too many promises at the edge, but definitely from on-prem to the cloud, across cloud, that super cloud vision nailed it. They simplified the complexity. And I'll tell you how. J2 announced a security cloud first. Cisco security cloud. Jonathan Davidson announced the Cisco networking cloud, which essentially allows you to extract and simplify all the different processes there from people, places and things accessing network, network services, cloud connectivity and apps. And then I really liked the AWS path, path enhanced enrichment. They actually have now path enrichment with AWS cloud, shows their commitment to cloud native and the disconnect between IP addresses on-premise to the cloud. This will be a fundamental stepping stone to cloud native networking. And again, something Cisco has been very, very weak at. It's cloud native networking. There's been a variety of starters that have popped up. We've interviewed on theCUBE. Cloud native networking is different in the cloud and it's different on-premise. But the power of networking is on-premises. That's hold with the Cisco customers. So they have the customers that have the keys to the kingdom. And if they can get them not to lose control, they can drive the cloud native networking revolution. They have Nexus dashboard, consistent user interfaces. And then J2 came out and really said, this carries the patchwork, introduce Cisco secure access. One access method for multiple environments. That's announced, not shipping. They announced that with thousand eyes. And then he talked about the public cloud, private cloud relationship that you pointed out, IP address versus services and building that distraction layer between them. That was one. And then they announced multi-cloud defense, another product, okay? And then they announced the secure firewall 4200. And then they announced the Cisco extended detection and response, I think, GA. Yeah, so they announced that at RSA. And then the SOC assistant. And my observation is they're behind a crowd strike there. A crowd strike sort of leading that charge. But everybody's getting into the XDR space, everybody. And so Cisco's got to be there. I'll share some other high level stats that I thought were interesting. Chuck Robbins said it's a complicated world. He talked about supply chains. He talked about war. He talked about data sovereignty challenges. And of course he talked about AI. He said by 2030, there's going to be 30 billion connected things. And 200, I think he meant today, there will be 220, there are 220 million connected to Cisco's IoT control center. And he said 90 million of those are vehicles. He talked about a single pane of networking glass. It's definitely about time. We're glad to see that. Like you said, new firewall. CNAP is coming and full stack observability. It's kind of a mess, as you know. You've got people doing log analytics, log metrics. You've got guys like Splunk who made a big splash there. You've got guys like New Relic. They bought AppD. And AppD can really give you good visibility on application performance. But the piece that was missing was really the thousand eyes. And last year they sort of did a little veneer and integrated them better. But now they're really driving thousand eyes throughout the portfolio to give full stack availability or visibility. And that, Cisco's a big player there. If I were, I mean, I think some of these startups in observability, they've raised a bunch of money, but it's a sort of weird space, right? You got a lot of the sort of legacy guys coming in. And I think Cisco's in a really strong position there because it's coming from the network strength. Same thing can be said for security. I mean, I think that network angle is huge. It's funny how they call it full stack observability when we've been saying the world's going half stack. They also use cloud first, which has been around for a while. But good to see Cisco gig in the game. I got to say, I am pretty enthused for Cisco, which I haven't been for a while because I'm excited. I like the company, but for the first time, the stuff that I cover, I go deep on, open source software, innovation around cloud native, data, AI, and networking in the cloud, this is compelling. So big picture. Now you got all these trillionaire companies, right? Obviously Microsoft, Google, two plus trillion videos sort of trying to get there. Amazon is there, obviously. Facebook dropped out. Facebook's now below Berkshire Hathaway. They at one point were over a trillion. Cisco's about a $200 billion market cap company. At one point, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world in the year 2000 with the dot com boom. And if you think about Microsoft and how basically Microsoft was irrelevant for the longest time, even though they were throwing off a ton of cash from their software, you think about Apple. Apple was completely irrelevant. Both of those companies came back and now are incredibly successful. To me, Cisco has the brand. They've got the depth, the engineering talent, and the scope of customer and the observation space. They could do something really interesting. I don't know what that is. I do, I do. But it's this next wave of the AI heard around the world. I'd love to get your thoughts on here, but we are entering a new wave, and Cisco could in theory capitalize that and join that trillionaire club if they figure out what's there that's not incremental, but that's a radical sort of moonshot. What do you think it is? I definitely see a path to the trillion dollar. I'll tell you how they get there. And this is actually the right path, in my opinion. They have an install base. They got to herd that, those cats, so to speak. Get that install base. Do not lose the crown jewel of the install base. Get the use cases. Get them injected with their vision because their vision is accurate. They have an absolute solid vision. Bring a platform, bring the products together, build that horizontal and to end layer, bring in third party data, because that's going to be critical. Network plus security is solid as a rock. The destination is multi-cloud and be the network for the world. We're talking low latency. Everything that we talk about, large language models, they check that box. Chuck Robbins actually said that. Requires low latency, edge requires low latency. The network is where the power is. That's where the innovation is right now, and security. They got to be that next-gen company. While they cuddle their install base and nurture them, they have to drive, like Microsoft drove, into the cloud. Drop everything and just start pedaling as fast as you can and just keep making great products, like J2 was saying. They have a path, they have a position. No one's going to replace Cisco. They're nested in there. They got a great competitive strategy. The worst thing that could happen to Cisco is they get distracted on a shiny new toy. Stay down, go to the cloud, full cloud ops, on-premise, edge, public cloud, distributed computing. They know networking and they got to convert their people over as fast as possible. Just like Office 365 was just office on their servers. Go subscription, flip that business and pull everybody to the future. Steve Jobs did it. You talked about that in the executive round table. He did it when Apple was hurting. He turned that up. Nadella did it with Microsoft and Chuck Robbins has the foresight to do it and the team needs to do it and they got to refresh the people around them. They can't have this dog bite, oh Cisco, the way you used to do it and blah, blah, blah, blah. They need fresh people at the table and the management team, I like, they're all CUBE alumnus, how can I not like them? So you're... But you're basically saying that SuperCloud is their path to the trillion dollar base. Yes, modern in the network. The network is so... But they got to bring their disparate SuperClouds now together. They got to bring their network cloud and their security cloud is essentially the Cisco cloud. It's basically the... And bring that out to the edge. I think the network cloud is going to subsume security as a feature. I agree. And it's going to be the Cisco networking cloud should be the brand. J2 should fall right underneath that and embed it everywhere. Data will be horizontally scaled. They have a data fabric, all multi-cloud aka SuperCloud and the secret will be apps on top of it. Meraki is a beautiful product. They should be have developers coding on that. They should have their own real-time data. That's going to be the key. They should have their own real-time database. All this stuff is totally in their grasp. It's within reach. They got the AI enabled. They got the scale. They got the customers. They could be untouchable. And let me add to that. If you can bring that experience to the edge and enable developers to build vertical applications. Cisco's not going to build those vertical apps. They have to enable developers to build those vertical apps and provide that powered network, AI powered network that's super secure, reliable, data sovereignty, all the things that they talked about, govern, that is a trillion dollar business model. The one criticism I have to Kino, one, only one criticism is that Liz should have left Quantum off the table. No need to bring that up. That was a waste of airtime in my opinion. They didn't need to, Quantum's important. They can talk about it another time. I would have put in its place cloud native software development. The open source movement, look at whether it's AI or in general, networking. They mentioned open telemetry in one of the slides. Open source cloud native developers will be changing the app game and Cisco should be aligning with that persona and being like, you're one of us. And that's got to be on the table. Cloud native super apps on super clouds. That's going to be the future of super networks on super clouds with super apps. The only thing I would say about Quantum is I agree with you. It was sort of a non sequitur. But if there's something there, if there's a there there, then good for her of introducing it. But I just feel like Quantum is still so far off and so unreliable. It's kind of not something that I would have previously covered on the queue, but it's not key noteworthy. I think the cloud native developer movement is way more newsworthy, more relevant and cooler actually than Quantum. Although Quantum is going to trough a disillusionment, but still, I mean, look it, I love Quantum. Don't get me wrong. It's just not as relevant and cool as what's going on in this renaissance of software development and the surge of open source in AI and code. So if Cisco doesn't win, not win, align with those developers, they're going to be in a lot of trouble. They won't get to the trillion dollar path. They got to take what they got now and they got to drive up the stack as fast as possible and enable applications to sit on top of what they enable. And they got to build an ecosystem. It's going to be a new kind of vibe for them, but they're locking down their core. And again, like I said, networking at AI scale, chips and networking software and then AI enabled applications. Last other thing is they've got silicon shops, whereas many companies don't. Obviously the cloud companies do. Cisco's one of those firms that actually has silicon shops. I think they could do some interesting things at the edge with ARM, which I've no doubt they're capable of doing that. But that, when it comes to low power, you know, they've got an angle there that many, many and most don't. The one other thing I would say is I'd be careful of is this AI might hurt their sustainability goals. I interviewed Matt Garmin at AWS just this week having Pebble's a story in the video, but they're going to be carbon footprint neutral by 2025 AWS. So they got a massive GPU instances. So what Cisco can do with their network, with policy to help that, I think that's going to, he brought that up. I thought that was really notable. There was so many good keynote points. I got to say, this was probably one of the best keynotes I've seen for Cisco. I'd like the theater in the round too, but that's not going to be as energy consumptive as running training models. Well, one of the things that we point out on the Cube is one customer use case is I'm going to provision a rack of GPUs on my data center. I don't, it's not, there's no over provisioning issue. I'm going to use them all. Yeah, that's true. So that's going to be a lot of energy. So put that in your pipe and smoke your sustainability. No, that ain't going to, that's going to kill your whole, yeah. Well, they're on ESG. I mean, they've got a responsibility. It's pretty heavy. Well, they given it more than lip service. They're basically saying almost a hundred percent of their materials is recyclable and sustainable. I mean, that's, that's impressive. That drops right to the bottom line too. Well, overall, the platform consolidation, the, they definitely crushed the measures of simplification. Your posts brought up the key points. They nailed it. I think we challenged them and I think they met the challenge, I have to say. Yeah, and I think for the, I'm pretty excited by Cisco's efforts. Again, they got to lock their networking and the playbook's so clear. They have the right team. They understand the market. I see what the end game looks like for them, but they got to just shore up their house right now, keep their install base happy. They got a little growth in their business. That's a tailwind. It gets in the right direction. They're awesome. So, you know, they got the foundation and of course we'll be going to digging into the execs coming on theCUBE here. Go to siliconangle.com. That's where all of our traffic is. That's where our audience is. That's where we'll be broadcasting this video. And of course, thecube.net. If you want to find a video, find an event, go check that out. That's where most of our CUBE alumni list is there, but SiliconANGLE is the site where all the articles and the videos will be hitting. And we'll be back with coverage more here. At theCUBE with our pop-up CUBE, Dave. Here in Cisco Live in Las Vegas. We'll be right back after this short break.