 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman, our next guest is Sergeant Gupta, Senior Vice President of Product Management for Cisco's Enterprise Networking Business. It's the crown jewels of Cisco. Sergeant got the keys to the kingdom, runs product management, so we'll get all the info from you. Thanks for joining us. Good to see you again, keep up the night. Yes, thanks. Thanks for coming on. I know you got a keynote at 12, coming up shortly, but thanks for spending the time. He'll get right to it. Networking is being reinvented. David Geckler said that on stage yesterday in the keynote. It's not changing, it's just shaping differently for customer needs. Intent-based networking, we talked briefly last year at Cisco Live in North America, moving up the stack. It's here, intent-based networking, cloud connections, IoT, all kinds of edge, connectivity. Everything's connected now onto the network. This is real. This is real. And John, look, it's been really exciting, right? We've gone through an 18-month journey here. When we first introduced intent-based networking, we talked about moving away from CLI box-by-box to really solving the problem at an abstracted, intent layer. Specify what user groups and what segments you want, what experience you want to deliver for those applications, and then the network feeding the data back up so you can learn from it, you can manage it, you can troubleshoot it in a much, much simpler way. We're now into this, as I said, 18 months. We have thousands of customers already using intent-based networking. We talked about software-defined access for automated segmentation in the campus, talked about assurance, and then we've been adding capability along the way. And just this week, David Geckler had people on stage who talked about more innovations with intent-based networking in the data center, with ACI Anywhere, with innovations in Hyperflex. Liz came on and talked about IoT and how that fits into the framework. And then Gordon talked about what we're doing with SD-WAN, really, really exciting stuff going on there. Well, I want you to take a minute, quickly explain for the folks watching. I want to get us on the record so we can get definition. What is intent-based networking? What does it mean? What's the impact for the customers? What is it? Intent-based networking means that you can now express your business intent. Here's the outcome I'm looking for from the infrastructure. The system and the architecture will convert that, automatically provision all the underlying components, get the data and the context back out, and prove to you that the intent you wanted was delivered. And what is changing now more than ever? Because applications are coming on. We see DevNet, we're in the DevNet zone. You're seeing a lot of activity, developers. Yeah, so now you've got networks that are programmable. Instead of individual devices that you have to learn from the ground up, all their bells and whistles, you can now live at that intent layer, at an API layer on top of the controllers, and move much more quickly. You can now start thinking about multiple domains on how you cross those domains. What is the big product change, if any? That's actually software is key to all this. This is hard, we've got plenty of hardware. We mentioned Liz and IoT. Still runs router, she takes that software, she packages up, we interviewed yesterday, she was talking about the synergies between the code bases and what she customizes for the IoT market. Then you've got the intent-based networking. What's the product look like? What's the products as they get more horizontal? Yes, so make the mistake, the hardware is still very important. Silicon, A6, very important. But the magic now is in the software layer. So it starts with the operating system, and Liz talked about how we now have the Cisco iOS XE operating system, which is modular, hot-patchable, API-driven, programmable, and now runs across the entire portfolio. It runs on her regularized IoT infrastructure, runs on our switches, runs on the wireless controller, runs on the routers and the SD-WAN edge nodes, virtual and physical, same operating system. And then there's the controller layer on top of that. So for the campus, you've got DNA Center, Cisco DNA Center, and then for the WAN, you've got Cisco Viptela V Managed Solution that provides that controller layer for automation, for analytics on top of the infrastructure. Yeah, Sachin, I wonder if we can help unpack that SD-WAN piece a bit, because WAN's been around a long time. I think back to the 90s, you know, WAN was something that helped us get the internet. In the 2000s, there was WAN optimization. I worked on a lot of replication solutions. I'm not sure that people understand the connection between SD-WAN and really enabling the multi-cloud world that we need today and the portfolio that Cisco has to attract that. That's a great question, you mentioned the 90s. I joined Cisco in 97, and I actually worked in WAN technical support. So I've been with WAN for a very long time. And this is not a, the customers aren't waking up and saying, hey, I need a new WAN. That's not how the conversation starts. What's happening is it's a business transformation question. The companies, the customers are using infrastructure as a service, AWS services. They're using Azure, they're using Google Cloud Platform. They're using all the SaaS products, WebEx from Cisco, right? They're using Office 365. They're using all of these new applications and their data is now not sitting in the data center. I mean, as we announced this week, the data center moves to where your data is. Well, now, if your data isn't in a data center that's conveniently connected through a WAN connection, and it's all over the place, it's in the cloud, in many clouds, you have to think about how do you get traffic in and out? How do you deliver security? And in this world where you may be using internet connections and all kinds of connections, how do you deliver the right application experience? And then, oh, by the way, how do you manage all of this? That's what SD-WAN is about. I need to transfer my business as I move applications or consume cloud services. I need to re-architect my WAN and SD-WAN helps me go do that. Yeah, I mean, a big piece of that is what a network person needs to manage today, a lot of what they need to manage, they don't own. They don't control it. And some of that means I can't necessarily put a box that I can dial in to and do this, so I need a software piece that I can put there as part of my overall configuration. Yes, you need a software piece and you need something that scales, something that is cloud-delivered. You can't be going to hundreds or thousands of sites and manually provisioning these for these services. You need to be able to have virtual services. Now, if you're consuming a cloud service, you need your router, your service presence, your SD-WAN presence in the cloud. So, network functions, virtual services become really critical in this world. Just on scale, I've worked with Cisco on a lot of branch solutions over my career. There's lots of different components of scale that these type of solutions play into. Yeah, scale, look, people say, if everything's in the cloud, does a scale requirement go down? Well, you think about it this way, I have 100 sites and I had one or two data centers. Well, now I have the same 100 sites and I have services that are hundreds of services. So I have applications I'm consuming and as I said, infrastructure is a service and I still have some data centers for my legacy applications as well. So the complexity has actually increased. The scale requirement has increased. I need a much better software method, a software-defined method to manage all of this. This is a key point. A lot of inflection points in the industry always have an abstraction layer to abstract away complexities. So you've got two things going on here that are pretty clear. It's more complexity and more scale. So software is the perfect solution to manage that. Is that what you're saying? Software is the perfect solution to manage this and I'll add sort of one more level to that complexity. Because your traffic isn't neatly going from your branch through sort of a lease line or MPLS circuit that you can VPN into data center, it's a more complicated traffic flow. I might be connecting directly to the internet. Security is a huge concern. That's a great point. I was going to ask you the flow question. You have the old expression, follow the money and you'll find your answers. In networking and in this business, follow the traffic. Remember, north, south, east, west, that became a paradigm that helped shape a lot of network architecture. Now you have new traffic patterns. Can you give some color around the new traffic patterns that comes with cloud, comes with edge? It's not just north, south, east, west. It's everywhere. So what's, what's- So new traffic pattern now can be, instead of from the branch to your headquarters to your data center, now the traffic pattern is direct internet access to the SaaS application or go to a regional hub that I have in a co-location facility. Well, in the old world, you had a security stack in your DMZ. So your best firewall, your best IPS solution, all layered in there. Now in this new world with your traffic getting directly those applications and data in the cloud, you have to rethink security. And so what we did is in our SDUN solution, we embed the best Cisco security technology, application firewall, URL filtering, IPS solutions natively in our SDUN software stack. And so you can deploy this across hundreds of branches now. And so you have assurance that the same level of security that you had in your data center can be delivered in a distributed way, in an easy way. And what happens is customers also want to consume cloud security. You know, maybe I don't want to run in my branch. I actually have a SaaS application. I want to use the Cisco umbrella service, right? So this is a secure internet gateway that processes this traffic, make sure things are clean, make sure we are safe, the customers are safe, and we can now integrate with cloud services and our SDUN solution with just one click. How important is this security paradigm you just mentioned? Because there probably will be consequences. We've seen IoT become a talking point around, oh, surface area, more surface area for security breaches. This security paradigm is different. Why is it important and what are the consequences if not followed? If you don't follow this paradigm, I think the risk you run into is that first of all, you will make a compromise on application experience because you're so worried about security. And let me give you an example. Customers may choose, hey, you know what? I'll continue hairpinning all my traffic through my headquarters because I have a rich security stack there and suffering application experience because I'm going this way to get to the cloud asset rather than going directly. And so by enabling that rich security stack to be virtually enabled anywhere you want it, anywhere you need it, we can ensure that you can have the maximum level of security that you need in your architectural design and still get the application experience by selecting the best path for your application. You know, so as you always, it's good business to be in enabling technology. We've seen that. You guys have lived that at Cisco. What is the most important story coming out of Cisco out of this show as you guys move forward that customers and the industry should pay attention to in your opinion? What's the most important story? I think the most important part of the story is intent-based networking and the architectural shift, the reinvention that it's created isn't about any single domain, right? This is happening in the WAN to solve application experience problems, SaaS application experience problems, security problems, automation scale. It's happening in the campus for segmentation, prevent lateral movement of threats. It's happening in the data center with ACI. And the customers want simple outcomes. What they're looking for is users, devices, things connecting to applications and data. Doesn't matter where they sit and ensuring that from a policy-based model they can automate end-to-end and they can get the visibility, the telemetry end-to-end to solve problems and to learn and to improve the network. So cross-domain traffic. Cross-domain. Application programmability of the network. Yes. And the role of data that plays in that seems to be a common thread. Beautifully summarized, John, that's exactly right. Well, what's come up in the keynote? What are you going to talk about here at 12 o'clock this noon tier in Barcelona? Yeah, so on the keynote, look, I'm going to recap why have we done this, right? Why does it matter? Why isn't CLI still going to work for you? And why did we need to reinvent our working? And then talk about the journey so far, all the new things we've announced. And then what I'm really excited about is I have a partner coming on stage with me talking about how we're delivering SD-WAN solutions for our customers, right? And how does that conversation work? What should you really worry about as you select the service, design the architecture you're going to go with? Sarge, I want to go back in time, little memory, jog your memory. I remember back in the 90s, multi-vendor was a big word. Multi-vendor meant interoperability. Working with multiple industry standards, stuff. I hear multi-cloud, I get a similar vibe. This seems to be the trend that people want to pay attention to just as much as hybrid cloud or maybe even more on the multi-cloud side. Some analysts are even saying multi-cloud is hotter than hybrid cloud. Do you agree with that? And how does multi-vendor, multi-cloud, Jive, Cisco, you've guys thrived in a multi-vendor world. Take, what's your thoughts on this multi-cloud? I think in both of those situations, customers are looking for freedom. It needs to be open, API driven. I should be able to move my traffic one place to the other, my applications from one place to the other, not feel locked in. And so it's critical to support open protocols, open APIs, and to provide customers that freedom. And SD-WAN actually helps provide that. We're using open protocols, open APIs, but at the same time, if I need to move my service from here to there, and I still need to deliver security, application experience, scale, automation, you can do that. So we provide that freedom to run that application in a multi-cloud environment. One of the things that comes up all the time when we have conversations with the geeks out there, the conferences, it's microservices and containers on one side, then the networking side, it's still latency and cost. We've still got latency issues and cost to move traffic around. Still a dynamic. How are you guys still looking at this? Latency is certainly super important in that we're moving packets around, traffic around. And cost, it's still costful. Is this the concept of data center moving to the applications? How do you guys look at that cost equation and the latency equation? That's still important. Can't change the laws of physics. The cost and latency equation is still really important, but the problem has changed now. As your applications now, your data center is sort of moving into the cloud. Think about Office 365. We still need to help you get the best experience for Office 365 as if you were running an on-prem solution. For that, we need to do things very differently to manage latency, to manage jitter, manage cost overall. So what we've done is we use an API integration with Office 365 to give you 40% better performance for that SaaS application. And we're doing this for many applications. So I think you're right. You're solving for similar things, but now everything's changed on you. Like the applications are in a different place. So you just have to solve them in a fundamentally new way. And it's the traffic patterns really comes down to it. And that's a tell sign of user expectation, user behavior, application behavior. This is the new normal. This is the new normal. Great. What are you excited for looking forward? As you look at your business unit, look at Cisco positioning, Sol, I like the new positioning. Very tight, very good. I like it bridged to the tomorrow, bridged to the future. Kind of makes sense, bridge. I like the double entendre there. But as you look at the portfolio coming together with multi-cloud, what are you excited about? What's... I think, look, and I've heard this from many customers and partners this week as well at Cisco Live. We've been on this journey for many years, right? Building out intent-based networking for each of these domains. And now we've got thousands of customers already using it. But the conversations are going from, hey, why did we need to do this? To, hey, help me perfect my design, and I now need to connect two or three domains together. How do we go do that? So we're now having a richer, more mature next phase conversations. So it's working with our customers to realize that value across all of the domains, from anywhere where their users and things are, to anywhere with their data and applications. And the network is foundational with the security architecture. You can build on that. That's where the magic will happen from your perspective. You see that. That's where the magic will happen. And you know what? Only Cisco can pull this off, right? Because we have leadership in every one of those domains and we're following the same architectural principles across all of them. So if someone said, Satchin, this is not your grandfather's SD-WAN. What do you respond to that? How do you update that narrative? What is the SD-WAN? New message. What's the new picture for SD-WAN? What does that mean? The new SD-WAN is about connecting to your applications and data in any cloud, in a multi-cloud environment. SAS, IS applications, it doesn't matter. And your private data center. Still delivering the best security, best application experience in an automated way at the skill that you need. Data is the center of the value of the project. We've been staying on theCUBE for nine years. Finally, it's happening. A lot of stuff coming together. We're meeting the road. Congratulations on your success and thanks for spending the time to come in. Great to see you. Thank you. Good luck on your keynote. This is theCUBE coverage here live in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Back with more coverage here from Cisco Live after this short break. Stay with us.