 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE here in Orlando, Florida for live coverage of Cisco Live 2018 North America. This is the big show. We were at Cisco Live in Europe recently. This is the big show of Cisco. They bring out all the heavy hitters. The CEO on stage just had the keynote. I'm here for the next three days with Stu Miniman, my co-host on theCUBE as usual, but also Wikibon analysts as well as a bunch of things. Stu, great to see you, great to be in Orlando in the summer, it's kind of hot and sticky outside with cool in here. Cisco, with the massive show here, huge in size, our first Cisco Live. Yeah, well John, last time you and I traveled for an event together, it was Cisco Live Barcelona, so yes. It's first time I've been to Cisco Live US since 2009 which was before theCUBE. Before I joined the team here, it's massive John. I mean, the amount of people here, the Orlando Convention Center, not exactly my favorite, just because it's sprawling, but you need a facility at this side and it's even overflowing it to get to somewhere between 25 and 30,000 people here. You know, so much that we're going to dig into in the next three days. So let's just run down the keynote from the CEO, from Cisco, laid out an impressive set of content, won the light show to kick it off. I'd probably say it's one of the best I've seen. The music was perfectly timed with the light show. You got a lot of props from the crowd. But really laid out the future of Cisco by looking back at the past and all the accomplishments Cisco's had and then laid out the new network and we'll cover that in depth. And then also surprised guest partner on stage, Diane Green, the CEO of Google Cloud. Clearly Cisco talking multi-cloud. They talked about this new network where protect everything, you know, use predictive, all kinds of technologies. How do you make cloud work without disrupting the operation was the theme. Interesting to hear Diane Green from Google Cloud kind of talk about, because she's really kind of a CTO, CEO type, really talking about the tech speeds and feeds. And then I'll see DevNet content towards the end where DevNet is the developer program and DevNet create the cloud native really growing in size, over a half a million registered developers and growing points to the success of the DevNet program that brings on premise and cloud native together. DevNet proper, DevNet create was the cloud native, that's the big news. In other industry news today, Cohesity announced a $250 million funding round, Series D oversubscribed, Cisco investments, one of the investors along with HPE as well and Sequoia Capital, et cetera, et cetera, shows that the market is heating up for cloud scale and I bring up Cohesity stew because we're going to have the CMO on tomorrow but this kind of points to the whole theme of Chuck Robbins Kino and I want to get your analysis. Cloud scale and the threats that's come the security side has changed the game. Now we've covered the perimeter's dead for years. This is now a call to action for all the engineers and the CNEs and all the people in the Cisco engineering and customer community like look at old ways over. The new way has to be established, it has to be scalable, has to be cloud supporting. What's your analysis? Yeah, so first one I wanted to step back for a second because my compare contrast of the last time we were at Cisco live in Barcelona, Rowan Trollup really talked a lot about the future. He said 2050 is right around the corner. The future of Cisco is a software company. Chuck Robbins on the other hand looked actually backwards for a little bit. He said let's talk about what we have done for the last 10, 20 and 30 years together really calling out the community. What we've always talked about, you know there's the army of CCIEs right past us here they've got a timeline talking about 25 years of CCIEs and the tens of thousands that are certified that their whole careers John is about networking. And then we kind of merge in a little bit. What do we talk about? You know, what is the new network? To term we've heard a bunch. The case that Cisco makes is that in this new world, you know cloud software applications they have an important piece to play and we really think they do. Networking obviously critically important security top of mind happening at the board level. And Cisco, they highlighted a lot of the acquisitions they've made, talked about kind of this new army. You pointed out rightly the developer area which we're here in the DevNet zone is really the hot topic over 500,000 developers registered on the platform that they have here. That's big news. We've looked at so many of the big companies. Oh, you know developers, developers, developers. It's a hot topic. It's something they want to do but they don't have a lot of success in bringing them on board. Susie Wei and the DevNet team's done a really good job moving that forward to happen, you know, a really groundswell of activity to get people involved, you know, happening all behind us here. And you know Cisco, obviously Chuck Robbs also pointed out that they've been looking, doing a lot of work over the past 12 months trying to be modernized, getting this new way established. A lot of press, a lot of analysts like to throw darts at these big enterprise companies that are transforming. We've seen some critical analysis on Cisco. We've seen critical analysis on VMware in the past. If you go back five years and look at, say, VMware and say Cisco, you know, these guys are out of touch. This is some of the pundits we're saying, things like that. If you look at what Cisco's doing, this is now my opinion I want to get your reaction to, is that Cisco has essentially pulled off a VMware-like move and that is, is that VMware has successfully looked at their core company and said, you know what, we don't want to do vCloud Air. We understand our customers. They're operations guys, they're going to the cloud. They kind of shut that down and repivot the vCloud Air. Go do the deal with Amazon Web Services. They'll probably do other deals with Azure and other clouds. VMware's earnings are booming. Their software-defined data center bet paying off. So those architectural things that don't look immediate are reaping rewards for, say, VMware. I see Cisco on the same boat. You're seeing what they've done. They're trying to fix that collaboration piece, which I know a little about experiences, but the core business, the security threats, running networks, networks having policy. And with Kubernetes and Istio, Diane Greene's point, that kind of brings a critical architectural components to you that really could propel Cisco. What's your reaction to that? Do you think that's spot on? Do you think it's BS? What's your thoughts? So John, VMware and Cisco both failed at cloud. Let's put it out there. vCloud Air failed. VMware went through a couple of iterations. Now their partnership with Amazon has reinvigorated them and absolutely VMware also partnering big time with Google Cloud. Everybody that has an enterprise player is trying to partner with Google Cloud. Cisco has a long history of good partnerships, but from a cloud standpoint, we talked to them for a few years about the inter-cloud. They're doing this all thing. It was muddy, people didn't understand it, and it is dead. So Cisco refocusing on partnerships. Google, good one to start with. Absolutely. Diane Greene, I think salivating up on stage, seeing 25,000 enterprise customers here that she wants to use her cloud. Did the quick poll of the audience said, oh, maybe about 20% of them are using Kubernetes. John, you were just at the Kubernetes show in Copenhagen. Tends to still be the early adopters out there. It's not something that everybody is doing yet, but Istio, Kubernetes. Cisco has a place there. They can ride that wave, partnerships, good to see them with Google. They absolutely are with AWS also. You and I did interviews with AppDynamics and some of the other Cisco folks that reinvented the past, and Microsoft is one that's going to play across all those environments. So lots of things to do in the cloud. Let's unpack that, because let's kind of extract the signal there, because what's the issue is that the Cisco ecosystem lags early adopters, because they're too busy running networks. And anyone who runs networks knows this is critical mission and critical stuff. Operational support, again, the security threats are there. But if you look at moving up the stack, which has always been Cisco's goal, how can we move up the stack? And there's been an internal generational shifts that's always been inside Cisco. When to move up the stack, how to move up the stack? I see clear visibility now with Istio and Kubernetes and Istio and containers as the Cisco guys that bring all the goodness of networking, policy, quality, these kinds of things, security, up to the app layer with Kubernetes. I think that that's lagging, mainly because the early adopters got to set the table, but a natural progression for Cisco customers to move there. Now, Google Cloud is interesting, right? Because Diane Greene, talking about containers and Kubernetes, they have Istio, that's their project. And there's also, you know, Kubeflow, Kubeflow, amongst other things. But if you look at Amazon, they have a Kubernetes engine just started shipping. That was announced, I think last week or the week before. Diane Greene's main pitch to the audience was this. You got to go to the cloud without disrupting your operations, but yet being disrupted with new technologies. Her premise is, she says, quote, keep doing what you're doing while introducing new mind-blowing things. I think, and I love that little slang as kind of a Silicon Valley vibe to it, mind-blowing things means machine learning, AI, things that Cisco wants to introduce as services, okay, to the cloud to help Cisco customers move to the next level, your thoughts? Yeah, John, I think you're absolutely right. Cisco, you know, really moving beyond just the network. Absolutely, they're going up the stack. What I would say is, when we dealt with virtualization, John, it took us about almost 10 years to fix storage and networking. And storage got fixed a little bit before networking. This whole container and cloud native space, networking is up there solving the issues a little bit faster than it did back in the VM days. Diane, you know, I really understand this piece too. And Cisco in many ways felt that they stumbled a little bit. They could have bought VMware back in the day. And they didn't, of course, EMC picked that one up. So when containers came around, Cisco knew that there was a new wave coming. They're ready, they're going after it, and they're trying to position themselves to be strategic in that next era. You talked to a lot of practitioners too. I want to get your thoughts and reaction to, you know, how Cisco's positioned vis-a-vis a big trend coming that we talked about in Barcelona at Cisco Live in Europe, which was this concept of network operations. What DevOps did for cloud by making an abstraction layer by making infrastructure as code make the cloud work. You're seeing network as code where, with Istio and containers kind of as a North Star, you're seeing that path. You're seeing Cisco well positioned. But again, Cisco customers are dealing with a lot of things. Some stats from the keynote, I'll just say a few. 50% of all traffic is encrypted. 70% of all bad actor traffic is encrypted. Okay, so 30% is unencrypted, still tons. 20 billion threats are being blocked today. That's 228 threats per second over the network. Massive scale. So Cisco, it's not like they're sitting around twiddling their thumbs saying, hey, let's be cloud native. I mean, they got real issues. They're running networks. They're trying to create a reinvention of the network. So you got the software defined data center. You got the notion of security, this kind of scale. How is Cisco positioned? Some of those dynamics with the path towards some of that goodness around Kubernetes, containers, and service measures like Istio. Yeah, and John, that's one of the things, some retraining of the workforce because network is really about operators for the most part. They architect things, they operate things. But how many of them are really the developers? Well, 500,000 are registered and on this platform, how many of them are moving to them that new environment and how many are new people entering the workforce. So we are seeing a major transition, major workforce transition here. Cisco is addressing it. I love when, I'm sure you saw, when you walk in past registration, there's this giant bookstore. And this is still the type of audience that, they're super excited to get all of these books. They're going to train, they're going to learn. I saw lots of people talking about coming to the show as to what they're going to get certified on. They like to meet the authors. They like to get involved. And that's something that this community has been really good at. It's sharing of information, learning information. And if they do that, they should be ready to be able to take advantage of some of these new trends. The other thing that I want to get your thoughts on is Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco, kind of said the old way, which essentially network architecture, as we know it, with the perimeter and whatnot, firewalls is essentially dead. He didn't say that, I'm saying that, but I'm implying from him saying, this is how we did it in the old way. And here's the new way. Here's the modern era. Here's what networks should look like. And obviously they have a lot of stuff on their product portfolio as well as their roadmap to address that. Okay, check. So let's talk about the role of the Cisco network engineer, the customer. In the old ways too, the network guys really ran the show. They were the top talent. They had to lock down, do a lot of branch office, run all the major packets through the networks. This was critical path. This was, they were the aces. They were the creme de la creme. So now in the face of that kind of going away, you have automation. Certainly their jobs aren't going to go away because like you said, I mean there's a lot to do in the cloud. How do network engineers, in your opinion, and I know you talked to a lot of practitioners, become that, stay as that tier one resource as DevOps now is mainstream, as programmable networks become more of the norm with the DevNet, DevNet create, with the multi-cloud. What does that network engineer become? What's their persona in the future reinventing the network? What's your view on that? Yeah, by the way I loved when Chuck Robbins put up and he said, here's the old ways. Like well really for most people this is kind of the way of today and this transition is going to be a little bit painful John. How do we get to this new environment? How do we keep moving forward? Absolutely John, the traditional firewall, we can no longer build the most. Security needs to be everyone's job. A great line I love that I've seen in the last year is security is not a product, it is a practice because it needs to be something that happens from the application side all the way down to the people that are doing the hardware. So I've talked to a number of customers, John. I was at a great little regional event in Boston last week and the CIO said, you know, two years ago I reported the CFO, now I report to the CEO because the role in companies that are doing it right, you know, lots of ways you can organize things but the IT is not a cost center. We know that it needs to be tightly tied to the business and if it's not working on things that drive the business forward allows to leverage data, allows to take advantage of some of these new things. You know, agility, all of these things. I'm just going to, you know, get rid of IT and go find some way to be able to get it from somewhere else. Well, this is a dialogue we want to keep going on. So you can follow us on Twitter. We're going to continue to talk about what is that role of that network engineer in the new world so that become tier one. Diane Green had a great quote and she said when pressed by the CEO of Cisco to kind of summarize kind of Kubernetes, all this stuff, what it means for the audience she said, huge productivity gains and the best way to run applications in a very consistent, scalable way. So you could say in the old days, network guys moved packets around and said I'm done, everything's secure. I'm going to go to lunch, I got my beeper, now my cell phone. Now it's not moving packets, it's moving applications. So you're seeing the movement up the stack is happening now. That's my kind of sense. Do you agree? Is that something that you see as where this is going? John, absolutely. You know, networking doesn't go away, it becomes even more important. You know, I go back John, even think about the XSPs back in the 90s. The reason that many of those models failed is it was oh, and network and security. Some of the biggest challenges we have in mobility and cloud, it's network and security. So does Cisco and all of these network engineers, they're going to have jobs? They might be going to some new places, they absolutely need to learn some new skills. But networking security, front and center for many of the ecosystems that we look at and good reason why we're here. And the other thing I think Cisco's got another feather in their cap, potentially, with the new model is the role of this, where the security plays in the architecture. Certainly it's a practice feature of everything, but if you look at the opportunities at the network layer and at the firmware layer, at the chip layer, we're going to be at Google next this summer for the CUBE live broadcast there. You know, I'm expecting to see security getting pushed down way in the stack, becoming native in the flow. And using that with policy with Kubernetes would be interesting. Security's still an open book. Certainly an opportunity for Cisco. It's an opportunity for everyone right now, John. We still have to solve that one. Okay, it's the CUBE coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. We've got three days of exclusive wall-to-wall couch with some great interviews. We're going to hear from the CMO for Cohesity tomorrow on the heels of their huge news. It's going to put a whole new level of scale with storage and, you know, converge infrastructure devices together and how that all plays. Of course, we've got a great lineup from developers, DevNet, folks, Susie Wee, and a lot of bunch of top executives, the Cisco and their customers here in the CUBE. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Get back more with live coverage, stay with us here in Orlando, Florida after this short break.