 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are day one of our coverage of Cisco Live from San Diego. We're going to be here for three days of coverage, but a great day so far, and we're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Kent Christiansen, the practice director from Insight with the Cloud and Data Center Transformation Group. Kent, welcome back. Thank you, it's been a little while. It has been a little while, so give our audience a little overview of Insight, your partnership with Cisco, and some of the history of how you got to Insight. Yeah, so you remember us as Data Link. We were a smaller company than we are now. Focused on Cloud and Data Center transformation. We've talked at Dell events, EMC events, things like that. But we were a Cisco partner for about 10 years, and recently we were acquired, and we did what the name sounds like, Cloud and Data Center transformation. We've talked about Cloud and the channel and all these other things. Insight acquired us. Insight has kind of four major service solution sets, if you would. Some people look at them as a supply chain company, and it's a great, large supply chain company, Microsoft's largest global partner. Some people understand it for the device, end user devices, that's called Connective Workforce. Each of these are pretty big businesses, compared to where we are. What was Data Link is now what's called Cloud and Data Center transformation. So we're helping people with the journey to the cloud, and the hybrid cloud, and all that other stuff. And Cisco's right dead center in the middle of that. And then the fourth one is really exciting. It's called Digital Innovation. And that's a couple of companies, Blue Metal, Cardinal, et cetera. Again, 1,000 people, Microsoft, IOT, and AI partner of the year. So all of that is a pretty large channel organization, if you would. That's great stuff, Ken. And we love to talk to the channel, as the folks in Wall Street do. It's like, we do a channel check, is, okay, Cisco's got a few areas that have stronger growth than the market overall. Security's doing well, a few other spaces that are growing faster overall than the market, and helping grow where Cisco's going. So, give us the reality. What's happening with your customers? What's driving the most growth in your business, and where is Cisco kind of leading the pack? So we're doing really well with Cisco. And I don't know if it's because we're helping clients build solutions that truly lead to business outcomes. We're not order takers. And so we're actually moving up. We're now Cisco's fourth largest partner. We're growing well high single digits growth, which is pretty phenomenal on such a big number. We're talking a billion dollars now, and growing that level. And there's a number of reasons. Some of it is, there's a lot of great technology, we can get into some of those. We see the economy as being pretty good. Not bad yet. Everybody's worried about what might happen. You mentioned security, we can get into a little bit of that. That's driving a lot of network refresh and stuff like that. And a little bit of intercompany, that we're getting our stuff together. So this large company with 15,000 customers, acquires a company with 2,000 customers, and now we're getting introduced into the 15,000 with less friction. So that's helping us, and that's helping our Cisco business. So here we are at Cisco Live, 30th time that they've done a customer partner event. The network has not only changed dramatically since their first event at 89, which was called Networkers, I believe, but networking technology has also massively changed. You mentioned security, and now in this multicloud world, no longer can you just put a firewall around a data center, right? Obviously that doesn't work. We have this core cloud edge, very amorphous environments, proliferation of mobile, of mobile data, traversing the networks. Talk to us about when you're talking with customers who need to transform their data centers, where do you start from a networking conversation perspective? Where automation comes in, where security comes in? You know, a lot of the cloud native center transformation says to be the edge of the network, converts infrastructure, stuff of that, that's on the edge. The network security guys, which I'm not, I work with them very closely, but we almost separate ourselves out from the data center networking security. But security's end to end, to your point, right? I've got software defined access, I've got mobile access points, I've got tetration, I've got all of these products that are helping people that in the past, they were just patching holes in the dike. You know, hey, this happened, let's put this software product in, this happened, let's put this in, and we actually built a security practice like the last three or four years ago. It's growing. You know, the number of people that are, whether it's regulation, compliance, you know, I got a real problem, I think I've got a problem and I don't know what it is, our ability to come back and sit down and say, let's evaluate what your situation is. So I was talking to the networking guys and said, wow, enterprise network is up, way up. What's driving that, the need to transform, or is that, you know, what is it? They're like, a lot of times it's something, or long security, that's making them step back and re-evaluate, and then sometimes that translates into an entire network refresh, so. So Kent, you messaged Cisco Tetration, that's one I've heard a number of times having some growth, what else, what are some of the hot products out there in your customer base? Software-defined, SD-WAN, SD-AXS. So one of the things I just want to understand, Cisco actually has a few solutions in some of those areas. Any specific products that you call out, or, you know. In the enterprise networking, I wouldn't go through each and every individual one. I think, this is my view as the layman, right, because I'm the data center guy, and here's the security guy, and here's the networking guy. I think when Cisco started acquiring all these security companies three years ago, and you watched it and it looked like a patchwork quilt, and said this doesn't fit together, now it fits together, that story is really solid. And so we've got clients that had the luxury of either saying I'm going to do a refresh because I don't want to keep plugging holes, and maybe my technology was ready for it anyway, because there's a lot of reasons to refresh, right? My technologies do digital transformation, I need to get my network ready for IoT, et cetera, but I keep hearing security over and over, right? I've got compliance and regulation and all of this other stuff. But in your core space, the data center world, you know, and any products that are kind of leading the charge right now? You know, one of the things that's happening in data center from a Cisco perspective, because they're babies, right? 10 years old in data center. They didn't really have data center before that, and we were there at the beginning, and that's really how CDCT built our data center practice. So, you know, when you talk multi-cloud, at the end of the day, even if I'm cloud first, I'm going to end up with some of these mission critical workloads. They might be boring. They're running the company, right? They're not the innovative DevOps, IoT, AI thing that seems cool. They're running the company, and that's still a converged or a hyper-conversed play. And some of those, you know, there's a lot of opportunities we've been talking about all day with the Cisco BU's. You know, some of those are ready for refresh, right? So, there's a great opportunity just going in and say, okay, what's next? You know, we've added, you know, the latest server technology. We've added all these things in the server technology. Obviously, all flash in the storage technologies and all of that. So, that's huge. And then, you know, Cisco continues to innovate in data center solutions with things like Hyperflex, which we, you know, talked a little bit about. And it started off a little slow, because, again, just like they were in servers, why are they here? Why are they in hyper-converged? Well, I get it. And now that product is slowly improved and improved and improved, and we're seeing tremendous growth there. And I think the luxury they have on a data center solution is that some of the other guys have to do a or. Hey, I'm the leading hyper-converged technology, but it's me or everybody else, right? And then Cisco's an ant, right? That I can connect those things together. So, let's talk about some customer examples. You can feel free to anonymize these. I'm seeing a smile on your face. When you come into an organization, whether it's a 100-year-old bank or it's a born-of-the-cloud or maybe a small or more nimble organization that needs to undergo transformation, data center transformation, what is the conversation like with respect to helping them take all of these disparate, presumably disparate solutions, whether they're 10, 15 different security solutions? How does insight come in and help them, I want to say integrate, but almost plug these things in together to extract value and help them make sure that what they're implementing from a technology perspective is necessary and also an accelerator of their business. Yeah, there's a lot there. So, we have this, so a year ago everybody wanted to talk about cloud and then you had the security guys, but now you have a lot of change agents with transformation in their title, right? And so, we have this belief. You're not going to digitally transform. Now, there are people that are born digital, but companies that were buying Cisco 10 years ago need to go through a digital transformation and you can't go through a digital transformation. It's how you have a data center transformation or an IT transformation. So, we've done studies. What slows people down? What makes these fail? Legacy stuff, security concerns. I mean, these are the top three things, right? Budget, I was just running the company. And so, we start there. That says, where do you want to get to? And then, most of it is, let's understand what you have, what your objectives are as an organization. I want to get to this. I want to get to that. Well before we start talking about technologies. And it's very services oriented, right? I can't just go in there and throw you a bomb and say, this is going to fix your problem because everybody's different. So, it is very custom and very services oriented. But you're saying? I was just going to say, it's a pattern I've seen quite a bit for the last couple of years. Is step one is modernize the platform, and then step two, you can worry about your data and application story on top of that, in that multi-cloud world that you live in. And step one admit you have a problem. Yeah. So, we actually did a study. Yeah. You know, we do this and we're like, well, why does everybody keep stalling? Why have we been stuck in this? Nobody's refreshing things and stuff like that. Well, there's a lot of new technology that they don't get it. But, you know, do you want to digitally transform, understand what you need to do? But we ask questions like, rate your IT infrastructure. Just rate it. B minus across a lot of large companies. That was what the grade they gave themselves. So, there's a lot of opportunity to say, okay, where do you want to be? Yeah. And where do we start? Yeah, 90% of people think they are above average drivers. So, drivers, but they think they have a B minus in IT infrastructure. And it's like, do you consider that a problem? So, once you, as we wrap here in the next minute or so, once you get them to admit, yeah, there's problems here that incite other partners come in and improve, data center transformation, modernizing that infrastructure. But it's got to be concurrent with starting to modernize and transform other areas, right? Absolutely. So, you know, there's so many places you could start. Sometimes you just go and say, well, what's your appetite? Every once in a while, you get somebody who's ready to go through an entire transformational process. You know, $20 million or more or whatever. And we get those opportunities. Those are awesome. Now we get to start back and figure out where you want to be and how to get there most efficiently. A lot of people have to pick and choose. You know, what's your concern right now? And so, we'll help them figure that out. And again, it could be security. It could be, you know, how many people? We have over a thousand enterprise customers running SQL 2008. That's a problem, right? Because that's end of support within a year, right? That's a problem, that's, you know, an opportunity. So, they are still trying to figure out these things. And then a picture on where I want to get to, which we've kind of always said, and that's where that digital innovation group, they've got all these AI projects. And as we sit here and talk about those things that kind of born in the cloud, but they're coming toward the infrastructure. It was easy to get a GPU in the cloud, but I'm going to have to start. And so, we actually have all the latest Cisco technology and storage technology of AI stuff in our labs and stuff like that. So, there's a lot going on. Our CEO would say it's a really exciting time to be in this business. It sounds like it. I wish we had more time to start digging through though, but you'll have to come back, Ken. Okay. All right, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thank you. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live, day one of our coverage of Cisco Live from San Diego. Thanks for watching.