 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at NAB 2017 in Las Vegas Convention Center. 100,000 people, places got a buzz. Last year it was all about AR and VR. This year it's all about machine learning and AI and platforms and storage and cloud. Kind of sounds familiar with most of the other events that we go to. So we're really excited to have industry veteran Roger Sherwood, he is the global strategy, media and entertainment lead at Cisco. Welcome Roger. Thank you very much. So first off you've been coming to this show for a little while, first impressions. This is my seventh year. We've been super relevant probably for the last two or three years, we used to be buried away in the other hall in a dirty corner. Yeah, what a fantastic show. I think it's bigger than ever. More exhibitors than ever, which amazes me in this space but it's pretty fascinating to see what's going on right now. Now you guys are doing big things. You basically took over Cisco.com. Yes we have, we get to do that for two weeks a year. For two weeks, so tell us about what's going on with Cisco and media. So for the show itself, NAB has become one of our major events. We used to do INTX and SCTE and very cable, telco led shows. Strong recognition within the company that a lot is changing on the content side, the production side and we've had these customers for many, many years very much selling into the IT side of these places. And two years ago we really took an approach of we're really becoming quite relevant on the broadcast side. The technologies change, the technologies move from very traditional SDI technology to IP. That's Cisco's wheelhouse. Virtualization, UCS, orchestration, security. For the first time we've been, we're very, very relevant on the content acquisition distribution production side. So yeah, we get to take over the Cisco homepage because for the next two weeks a lot of people want to talk about media and entertainment. Brand new website, brand new customer testimonials and everything else. It's nice to get that recognition from the company that this is a big thing. Right, and there's a solution behind the takeover, right? It's not just for publicity that you guys have. Oh no, no, no. And it's all real. It's all real. No, we're absolutely doing things. The big thing for us is this transition to IP. We're an IP company, 30, 35 years ago the company was founded on the premise of IP. This industry is one of the last ones to go from a legacy protocol. I mean, broadcast has been broadcast. It's been the same for 30, 35 years. And it's your classic kind of opportunity needs capability. Dude, it's in transition. And Cisco loves to go into transition. And what Cisco also loves to do is take out legacy network protocols. So SDI is exactly that. IP is here. I would say that only in the last 12, 18 months, however, we actually had the compute capacities, the bandwidth capacities to take what is essentially, you know, I'm being filmed in uncompressed video right now. Right, right. You know, the routers and switches that we sell have not been able to process that amount of information for the last 12, 18 months, Moore's law and everything else and some software optimizations. Uncompressed video is flowing at high speed across data networks that Cisco provides. That's a great place to be as this industry recognizes that that's where it's going to be. It's funny the Moore's law thing, because people like the poo poo on it, you know, it's, uh-uh, looking at chips. It's like, no, Moore's law is an attitude. Absolutely. It's a way to attack problems with just massive increases in capability, whether it's networking, storage, or compute. And the combination of the three together is crazy. And that's exactly where we find ourselves two years ago and so, you know, very good timing. But we are a company that likes to step into those and say, you know, we got this, right? We understand. We've seen so many transitions in other industries from legacy to IP. And hey, this one is just high cash aid for the company. I mean, the brands and the names and the companies that we get to work with right now, you know, from Disney to NBC to the BBC. These are fabulous companies that are, you know, global recognition, right, for Cisco. And it's interesting with the UCS comparison, not so much that it's apples to oranges, but the fact that, you know, Cisco taking more of a solutions approach and not just known for the routers and switches and, you know, kind of the IP backbone, but an integrated solution where you can pull and compute and you can pull and store. And oh, by the way, it also has the networking stuff. So now you've got, your offering customers a really interesting packaged, cloud-based application solution, if you will. And then as you mentioned, still partnering with best-of-breed applications and that's been key. I mean, look, this industry demands, in some cases, immediate solutions. I have a problem and I need to solve it. And I'm not so interested in an architecture and a roadmap and tell me where you're going over the next 12, 18 months. I need something now. So yeah, we've absolutely been very focused on, I mean, everything on our booth is available to buy, right? Sometimes we show up to shows and it's all futuristic stuff that maybe we don't even develop at some point. It's all on our price list. The partner side of this is absolutely key. So we would not be here without Grass Valley, without Evert's, Sony, EVS, big, big traditional broadcast of vendors that have validated our solution and in turn turned around to the industry and said, these guys get it. Right. The other interesting part is that, you know, you guys are doing so much into space, right? That you've got the solution space and that you are doing the partnering and that it's a great move for Cisco, right? So much better than the infrastructure. I mean, it's really, there's very few companies that can do the IP side of things. When you add in security, compute, orchestration, professional services, training, like just training, you know, broadcast engineers that have been so steeped in high quality video and they've known SDI and they're now coming to us and saying, help me get trained in IP IT. I recognize that this transition is coming, but I don't want to lose, you know, I've got a legacy skill set, help me transition to the new. There aren't many companies that can offer that range of solutions and services and we're doing this with a real focus. And we've heard security over and over and over for the last couple of days. I mean, it's a huge to do. So I've tried to move that from the last thing we talk about to the first thing that we talk about. You move to an IP network, you connect that IP network to a data center, that data center is connected to the internet and these guys absolutely free, it's like, you know. The other cool thing for you guys is that, the primary distribution method via SDI or some of these other old school broadcast methods are now no longer, I mean, they're an important piece of the puzzle, but there's now the stuff is going out on all different types of applications. And all that stuff's IP at the core, right? Those are all IP applications at the core whether Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, et cetera, et cetera, those were never kind of broadcast medium. And you know, 2009, 2010, this industry was saying, we're going to go IP, but it was always, well, you know, it's out there in the future. You're exactly right. The ability to now, the barrier to entry, to get this type of content onto an IP network and down to every single device on the internet, it's never been so low. And so that's where you're seeing this, you know, this high value premium content creation, acquisition, editing process. You know, it's been recognized that they've got to move as well. They've got to move to a far more flexible infrastructure, automation, machine learning of how things work, analytics, the whole, you know, the whole caboodle. And we're right there, you know, we're right there to support this industry to do that. And it's such an easy fit, right? Because this industry is built on temporary projects and the temporary assembly of a team, they come and they produce and they create and then there's a lot of derivative assets and then they turn the whole thing down, right? I mean, how perfect for a client application? Absolutely. I mean, we've been talking about that with some of the Hollywood client. That's exactly what they stand up, massive amounts of infrastructure for the latest Avatar movie, for instance, right? And then they tear it all down and it's all written off and then they go build a new one somewhere else. We think the industry can be a lot smarter about that. Here's a way to truly repurpose, hey, what you just built, you no longer need to throw it all away. So I want to shift gears a little bit. We cover a lot of open source shows, right? Open source is big. And you're part of the alliance for IP media solutions, right? So there's always this question between now, kind of open source, deriving, you know, kind of standards in adoption versus, you know, kind of old school standards bodies. What role has Ames played? Give us a little bit more color as to their kind of role and how that's kind of shaping things. So I'd say the old school standards bodies are absolutely alive and kicking. Simty, VSF, Amwar, these guys have been around for years. What they are very focused on, however, is really making sure that there is technical interoperability between ourselves and all the vendors in this industry as this move to IP takes place. So we want a utopia where you can plug in a Cisco infrastructure or a Rista or an Evers and it's all going to work. That's what those standards bodies do for the industry. Ames has basically said, that's great, but it's a very, very technical thing. And there's some very, very technical people that like to talk technical things. To truly drive an industry forward, we've got to sort of go up the stack and become much more relevant from a marketing perspective. And Ames has basically said, look, we support all the adoption of IP, but let's actually go push out use cases. Let's push out public references of customers that are doing this today. We need to drive the industry forward at that level. So very much about the promotion of open standards, interoperability, but really looking at how we market that and foster the adoption of these standards. Okay, so last question before I let you go. Priorities for 2017, I started to believe we're a third of the way through the year, but I'm still asking the question because we still have a ways to go. What's kind of your top of mind awareness? What are you working on? Obviously big launch here for the next couple of weeks, but looking down a little bit further down the road. What's your top of mind? Virtualization. We've been looking at virtualization. We've been telling the industry that they need to move to virtualization, that all these applications that are currently hardware, software locked today, that hardware piece is going to disappear. It's all going to move into software. It's all going to move into VMware. You need an IP foundation before you can do that. And that's what we're seeing take place right now. 12 months from now, the main headline for Cisco is going to be how we're helping every application vendor and our customers move truly into a virtualized data center model. And then again, back to our little thing about avatar and the tear down, that just becomes a thing of the past. Now it's about reusing all of that data center over and over and over again, for all the other avatars. So funny, right? Recurring theme we see all over the place. Just a little bit late here in the M&E space. All right, well, Roger, thanks again for taking a few minutes of your day and I'll see you around and go warriors. Absolutely. All right, Roger Sherwood, I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE from NAB 2017. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching.