 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 our live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live 2019's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, I'm a student minimum. Our next guest is Dave Cope, who's the Senior Director, Market Development Cisco Cloud Platform. Great to see you again. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it. One of your products is the big focus of the keynote introduced in the cloud center suite. One of the core announcements, this is pretty critical for Cisco. Obviously multi-cloud, we've seen the Kubernetes relationship with Amazon. We've got Azure, Google Cloud. Cisco's tied up with the clouds, which is good. They have the on-center core data center. But now dealing with cloud has been really the hot topic. So thanks for coming on. Absolutely. So I want to get your perspective first on cloud in general within Cisco and within your customer base. And the industry, what is multi-cloud? Why is it important? Why is it a wave worth betting on? No, it's a great question. And I think that's actually it's a really fun time right now because if you think about it, it's almost exactly 10 years ago where AWS's EC2 first came out of beta. And so everybody's talking about the cloud, but it really hasn't been around that long. And even in that sort of 10 year period, it's gone through sort of skepticism to, I think, let me try some non-critical apps to debate about public or private or which is the best public to today, 94% of the businesses say they either are planning to use multi-cloud environments. And so if you think about it, that's both provided a lot of advantages but also created a degree of complexity and how do I apply traditional disciplines like network management and security across environments that I control and don't control. So it's a whole new world. And the DevNet zone, which theCUBE is based out of again, this year has a hot growth vibe too where people are joining the community at record numbers. The demos here aren't just like K&Demos, they're actually real code. So you're seeing a developer framework around the network and the cloud, the cloud is not a one vendor product. It's an architecture, it's a concept. And so cloud operations is in the cloud. It's also being done on premise and the edge. So everything's cloud now. So if you think about it. Well, I think what we saw is obviously huge initial growth of cloud and a lot of applications moving to the cloud. But it's always been my hypothesis and I think it's actually coming true that we're now and some of the newer technologies support this. We're seeing this natural distribution of workloads across all these environments, whether it's the public cloud or the edge or the data center. And it's now technologies that allow you to put the workloads in the right place based on business priorities, not IT priorities. And now I believe you're starting to see this sort of natural stasis and the whole pie grow again. So I got to ask you the question from a customer perspective. So I'm a customer, I'd say Dave, love it. You got me, had me at cloud, I'm there. I got all the stuff to deal with. I've been working my business, running my business. Love it. What's in it for me though? What's the impact? Is it to do differently? Is it, do I have to change anything? How does a customer engage with Cisco and the cloud and the multitude of technologies that are available to them? It's seem complex, but. Yeah, no. I mean, I think people had hoped that the cloud would make everything easy. But what they're finding is that the cloud is not the cloud. It's private clouds, public clouds, virtual private clouds. And if you think about it, good free market principles, all these cloud providers are competing with each other. So they're all becoming very different. Cisco finds, I think, itself in a very unique position because of its heritage around network management and security, which is connecting everything together. We don't have our own cloud. So what we focus on is providing a very broad and deep solution to be able to manage workloads across all of these environments. So you truly can place the workload in the right place. Yeah, I wonder if you could help us unpack a little bit what you just said, which is the clouds are actually becoming more different, not more similar. At the Kubernetes show, we talked to Cisco, we talked to the whole ecosystem. The founders of Kubernetes said they weren't creating a magic layer. That's not what Kubernetes is. There's some base functionality, but everybody's building on top of it, and that's where a lot of the complexity comes in. So how does Cloud Center suite, you don't want to do what in the past, it was, let's dumb down everything so that you get a least common denominator. I want to be able to leverage the individual features of my Azure and my AWS and in my data center, but I need to be able to get my arms around managing that whole environment. Yeah, and if you think about the old world, if you had an application and a target, whether it's a cloud or any data center, you'd have to hardwire those together. And as you have more and more apps and they're changing faster and now more and more cloud environments with no standardization across those environments, this whole hard wiring together doesn't work anymore. So we have to rethink cloud management and that's what Cloud Center is really all about. How do you describe an application, its components, sequence, and dependencies independent of the nuances of those targets and allow Cloud Center, once you define your application to understand the resources on each of these environments and lay down that application natively on those different environments. And it does provide both least common denominator support around core primitives like compute storage, network security, but also provides access to these higher level services, whether in case of AWS, it's RDS, ELB, et cetera. So you really get the best of both worlds. Move there easily, manage the workload, and take advantage of all these rich services. You know, I love the keynote clever play on words, data center, centered, data is the center of the value proposition. That kind of highlights kind of you think just basic networking 101. Move a packet from point A to point B. Now you have more intelligence in the data. So the data layer is now the enabling opportunity to build software. So look no further than microservices and containers and you go, hey, this is pretty cool. Policy-based, sounds like service meshes. So you got policy-based whatever that's been a core competency in the network moving to the application with the applications programming. So we all kind of like go, that's great, it's DevOps, thank you, check. Now, how do you deploy it? So I got to ask you on the Cloud Center 5.0, the suite. This is new, it's the big news. How does that help me move to a microservices architecture? What is it offering? What's different than Cloud Center before it? Well, so Cloud Center has always been this platform that allows you to manage the entire life cycle of applications across any private or public clouds. And it's always been a very comprehensive solution, perhaps too comprehensive for some people. And so with Cloud Center Suite and 5.0, what we've announced is both new functionality and easier consumption. On the new functionality, we've extended our price and performance benchmarking that allowed you to identify where to place workloads to additional cost optimization capabilities that would actually make recommendations and allow you to remediate and take advantage of those cost optimization recommendations. We have a new action orchestrator workflow, which is a customizable workflow, but with out-of-the-box connectors that allows you to integrate with both Cisco and third-party products, Cisco security products, things like non-Cisco, ITSM, ServiceNow applications, so you can provide users with a catalog. So new functionality. That's the workload manager. That's the workload manager that provides those out-of-the-box connectors, and a workflow to be able to reach out, run those routines. So can that do end-to-end management? Absolutely, absolutely. And when we talk about Cloud Center, sort of full life cycle management, is the model of the app, sort of the benchmarking or cost optimization, the deployment of the app, whether it be traditional VM-based work, microservice-based, and those working together, and finally the ongoing day-to-day-three management. So I get that. You guys had a little bit of workflow management before, but the new things are orchestration, action orchestrator, and the cost optimizer. Cost optimizer, I get that SCATICO thing. Yes. The action orchestrator is interesting to me. What does that mean? I mean, is that just cloud-enabled? What does that mean, action orchestrator? It's really a dynamic workflow engine that allows you to either create customizable workflows, or if you've already invested in things like script libraries in your application routine, it can reach out to say, go do a snapshot of the data, and then reach back into the application topology, or reach out to a third-party tool like an ITSM tool, or reach out to their CMDB and update their CMDB to do capacity management. So it gives you all of that flexibility. And by the way, and all of this, while we were on-prem only, now we're going to provide both on-prem and Cloud Center Suite as a SaaS. So now it really makes it nice. It also is available in three tiers. So it's never been easier to start simple and grow. Could be one app, one cloud, and then you could expand clouds, apps, and users and functionality as you grow. But what if I have other systems under management, other management systems? Does it integrate into those? Do I have to toggle between them? What's the... No, it will actually integrate into those management systems. But the whole idea is, if you think about the average global 2000 company, today they have more than four public cloud providers, and many more regions than that, and this does not include SaaS apps. So what I think most companies realize is they don't want to have siloed management environments where they have to have expensive skills to manage everything. Yeah, we spend a lot of time talking about those technical pieces. How do I get something to work in multiple clouds or move them? But one of the biggest challenges I hear from users is the skill set. I need to, I'm CCIE certified. I understand how to manage my environment. I've gone through my AWS certification, and there's that. I need to learn a new language when I go to Azure. So how are you from a management standpoint going to help no matter which point I'm coming from, understand and use this tool simply? Yeah, it's sort of interesting. So a very large media company, I can't use their name, but you'll find this analogy is, they found that on average, they needed two fairly highly paid skilled individuals for every target cloud environment. The other thing, by the way, is sort of interesting. They measured is that, without sort of a cloud management platform, for every pairing of an app to a cloud, they had to custom write about 1200 lines of scripts. And every time the app or the cloud changed, and they did, they had to rewrite 20% of those script libraries. So between skilled resources and these manual script libraries, it just becomes unmanageable to have diverse apps across diverse cloud environments. And what's the status, can just a quick update on the multi-cloud and relationships, Google, AWS, Azure. The recent announcement we covered was the Amazon Kubernetes deal, congratulations, great deal. What's the status of the relationship with Cisco multi-cloud strategy for your customers that have Google, Azure and AWS? Sure, well first of all, more broadly, Cloud Center today allows you to deploy and manage applications across all of the popular private and public clouds. And I think that adds up today to be about 15. So you can do that. From time to time, we'll see new technologies, in this case, Kubernetes, where we'll provide specific strategic partnership solutions to let our customers take advantage of that. So we announced the hybrid Kubernetes solution with Google and that with AWS. And these are very interesting because now we're taking Kubernetes, which is evolving from really a cool developer thing and now starting to move into production where IT ops gets involved. And they say, how do I apply policies? How do I have governance, security? And these solutions with Google and AWS create really that transparency of the data center and those cloud environments. We were talking before we came on camera here about your history and I want to get your perspective a little bit more on the entrepreneurial side in a bit. But I got to ask you, you go back seeing the early waves of IT, it started out single vendor, big mainframe, now history there. Then became the whole open systems networking, the web and the internet. Client server along the way. Client server, but the one thing that was consistent over those decades was the word multi-vendor. Multi-vendor was important. Support multiple vendors and that became the interoperability and then growth happened. So good things came behind that. We're seeing the same trend with multi-cloud. Similar dynamic, but different environment, obviously cloud. If that's the case, multi-vendor create a lot of opportunities. How do you see multi-cloud creating opportunities for customers who are changing as well as people building apps? I think we've actually seen that shift in the cloud. So I think for a lot of people, the cloud meant maybe reducing costs or shipping from CAPEX to OPEX. But today what I see is it's about accessing innovation and that these clouds are often becoming an extension of their engineering organizations. And you never know where that innovation is going to be able to occur. And so I may want an Alexa API for a voice-driven application or access AIML from say Google. And so now I think multi-clouds multi-vendor is driven by access to innovation. And it's also about optionality. CFOs talk a lot about optionality and maintaining purchasing power. And they'll often put a value on that 10 to 15% value and just having that optionality as innovation occurs I can take advantage of it. And the speed too on the agility. I mean this is like real competitive advantage. People are building management practices around encouraging versus discouraging experiments or tests. Well think about where we started this talk is that it was just 10 years ago where there was really one person, there was AWS EC2. And today there are a lot of choices and a lot of technology and innovation. The whole idea is how do I easily access that? Well I want to get your perspective since you're here on, I know people might not know that Dave has an entrepreneurial background done. Eight startups, last one was sold to Cisco. So you're now in the big company with great product congratulations. But customers have to be entrepreneurial. We're just talking about being agile. That's an entrepreneurial vibe or spirit. And you're starting to see agile really be kind of very tactically like entrepreneurs taking new territory, trying things, failing, iterating. This is kind of the dog whistle for entrepreneurship. How can Cisco customers be more entrepreneurial with these new set of technologies from Cisco and the cloud? Because that's really what's happening. I got a refactor, my existing resources and be entrepreneurial. How can a customer be entrepreneurial? What's your advice? Well I probably have a bit of a jaded position today but I would say that technology enables that agility because now I can start to have an abstracted access to some of these capabilities. So we talked about hardwiring into different environments. Once I did that, I made that investment and I could not be very agile. Today whether it's things like cloud management platforms or things like Kubernetes, it gives me that agility to develop and deploy anywhere. Things like data hub technologies like SAP's data hub that says now I have apps anywhere, accessing data anywhere. I no longer have to hardwire everything. Multicloud doesn't have to mean lifting and shifting or refactoring everything. I can now start stretching these configurations across multiple environments which gives me that agility to set it up and to change as things change. So more creative thinking probably can come to the table. More creative thinking but more agile abilities to implement your creative thinking. I think technology. Great valuable solutions. Exactly. Yeah, that make money. Yeah, exactly. And fun. Dave, thanks so much for coming on. Great to see you. Congratulations. Dave Kopa, senior director. He's talking about cloud center here among other things in Cisco Live, Barcelona. It's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.