 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live day three from buzzy sunny San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Stu Miniman and Stu and I are pleased to welcome to theCUBE Stephanie Weibald, senior product manager, hybrid networking and SD-WAN from CenturyLink. Stephanie, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, I'm glad to be here. Yeah, so welcome to the buzzy DevNet zone. This place has been buzzing for three days now. It is definitely an active session over here today. It is, so let's talk about SD-WAN. We've heard a lot in the last few days about the massive transformations to the network. Changing customer demands, changing customer needs. Talk to us about the SD-WAN marketplace overall. So, we don't have a conversation with any of our customers these days that don't include some kind of a conversation about SD-WAN. Everybody's looking to transform their networks and they're looking for the next best thing. They're also trying to future-proof their networks. Some of the customer drivers that we see are folks looking to augment existing MPLS networks with lower cost access, making the best use of their assets, both from an equipment perspective, as well as a network perspective, and then having that sort of centralized command and control capability that SD-WAN provides them. All right, so Stephanie, the SD-WAN space, while most customers are familiar with it, it's not a monolithic space. It's not like there's five products in the market and they're all very similar. There's a few different areas and even Cisco has two primary products that you're offering. Can you give us a little bit about the lay of the land as to what use cases there are for the various pieces? How do you decide which there are, I know I've talked to customers that have had multiple SD-WAN solutions. That's a good point. So when we initially started looking at SD-WAN, we kind of did an RFI on about 15 or so different vendors. The market has compressed a little bit since then through acquisitions and mergers, but we at CenturyLink in particular recognized that one size does not fit all for all customers. So we wanted to offer a choice of services for our customers and most of the vendors have very similar kind of capability, but some have other features that some don't. For example, the Maraki one, we typically have our branch customers are customers that have many homogenous kind of like sites, that they want something simple and something easy and not something that has a lot of bells and whistles. That's a perfect fit for them. It's very easy to install and get it up and running where something like Viptella that has a lot more capability and a lot more customization available would be perfect for some of our larger customers. Viptella, for example, is we have a large install base of customers already using Cisco Gear, the ASR and the ISR, where that's very attractive to those folks where they can just lay the software on top of their existing assets without having to do a full network swap out. And then our other option is our Versa, which was our initial launch, which is in 2016. Again, that's a full featured SD-WAN capability. So it kind of depends. And we try to bring the customers in, have that conversation, understand what their drivers are so that we can help tailor them and select and help them select one of the options that we have. Yeah, I have to imagine that most of the time you're really helping the customer down there. It's not, you know, okay, there's a catalog, you know, choose which one. That's some of the reason we would go to a CenturyLink is that you listen to them, understand that, and you've helped filter a lot of that for them and maybe get them down to, you know, so some of the, just what size they're buying. Yeah, and it's not just, you know, the vendors, the pure play vendors talk about, what we call it, the tip of the iceberg. So they talk about the SD-WAN capability, where CenturyLink can add a lot of value to that is we also provide hybrid WAN solutions and PLS. We also do, that's the public, the private section, and we recently, with the introduction of our SD-WAN services, started offering public connectivity and broadband and Wi-Fi so we can offer the mix of access along with the overlay service. We can be the single button to push for that, but we also have had extensive history and managed services, so we have done managed routers and managed I-ads for our voice, our data, and then the other big portion of that is we are a global provider, so for those customers looking to expand or already in our global network, we've got one of the largest global backbones in the world. So let's give our audience a view from a customer who is in the process of needing to upgrade their network, being able to, future-proof it, as you said a few minutes ago, be ready for Wi-Fi 6, say it's a bank with many different retail branches. What would be the ideal solution for them? Would it be something more like Viptela that is that more customizable, that in one branch you might need a much smaller pipe than you do at a much larger branch? Walk us through that for a customer that's going through that upgrade process to modernize their network. Yep, so we try to have our technical experts go in and sit down with a customer and kind of do a question and answer session and try to understand what their business drivers are, what solutions that they're trying to solve for and provide guidance and expertise along that lines and try to suss out. We also have what we call a transformation workshop where we like to bring customers in and have that kind of in-depth conversation, one-on-one conversation, show them some of the demos of the services that we offer and try to suss out what their real requirements are and then, again, we can offer solutions and say, hey, based on the footprint that you have, based on the connectivity options that you want, based on your timeframe, based on your cost, all of those things are factors into where we would direct a customer. So giving them sort of a prescriptive, customized pathway for that upgrade based on all the analysis about what they're currently at and what it looks like and where they want to get to. Exactly, exactly. So, Stephanie, I know you do those in-depth discussions with customers. One of the great opportunities about a show like Cisco is you've got, what, 28,000 people here coming by the booth, coming into sessions. So you get to speed date on some of these things. But what are some of the top things that they're asking for? What are some of those pain points that you're hearing from customers? Is SD-WAN one of the top things bringing them to you or what are some of those key conversations? SD-WAN, that's been kind of the industry term and so everybody knows a little bit about it and the crazy part is a lot of people coming in and have really done their homework and know a lot about the differences between the different platforms. Security is at the top of everybody's mind and that is another really big driver that everybody wants to have a conversation about security. How can I get security patches out to my endpoints faster and better and quicker? How do I integrate my security with an SD-WAN solution? And so we see those a lot. We have answers for those questions and we can help folks figure that out. So here we are at the 30th annual Cisco customer partner event. Lot of evolution in the last 30 years. A lot of work has been done by Cisco to transition from just a hardware network gear provider to hardware now software. Challenging for large organizations with the history and the product depth and the networking expertise that a company like Cisco has. I want to get your opinion. You've been with Centrelink for a long time, Centrelink and Cisco also go way back. What are some of the advantages or is Centrelink seeing by Cisco's transition to more of a software provider? Cisco's always been a great hardware provider partner for us and I hadn't worked in that space too much. However, the folks that we have been working with both on the Maraki side and the Vibtela side are super responsive, super willing to help. They're always available. What questions can we answer? Can we get in? Is there training that we can provide? They've been great, got super partners to work with. In terms of the customer reaction though, is it giving you guys a leg up and advantage that there's more of a software led approach? So looking at an old legacy company that is much more modernized, if you think of how Cisco would compete with the board and the cloud company, what is that kind of competitive advantage like for you guys? That's an interesting thing too. So where Cisco has traditionally been a hardware provider, a lot of our customers are very familiar. They're CCIE network certified. It's funny trying to get those folks over. Some are very, it's usually the younger set that's willing to go the whole software defined route. So it's a challenge. Some folks are very much old school and they want to stick with the hardware based solutions and they don't want to move to the digital world. However, things cloud computing and all the applications moving to the cloud is kind of forcing them there. So it's kind of a slow cycle on some of those and then some of their smaller groups and the early adopters were the ones that were, yeah, let's just jump in and go directly the software route, so. Yeah, Stephanie, you bring up a great point. I used to give presentations and when you would talk about rollout of technology in the network world, we measure it in a decade. It was like, okay, here comes 10 gig and there's the standard and here's the piece and all the things like that. What are some of those drivers in your customers? Because are they moving, we feel in general they are moving faster, speed is one of the things that we talk about, that agility to be able to respond. So what are some of those drivers from your companies that you work with that's helping them refresh faster, look at new technologies and be open to some change? I think it's just keeping up with the industry. Like you said, it used to take years to do things and now it's changing on a monthly and a weekly basis and people are, I think they're a little bit scared, it's like if we don't do something we're going to get left behind and the industry is kind of forcing people to make those changes. Cost driver is another one that we see and people having to hit their fiscal numbers and everything else like that, but network transformation is not a simple thing, it's not a quick go in, run something. It's something that requires a lot of planning, a lot of analysis and you want to, what are the old Carpenters say? You measure twice and cut once, right? You want to plan, you want to plan, you want to plan and then you implement. So it does take time and people are getting there. When we first started talking about SD-WAN there was a lot of talk, it was a lot of talk, it was a lot of talk, it was a lot of talk and all of a sudden then you start seeing and it seems to be speeding up, people wanting to make decisions. We've had people that have had experiences and that have shared experiences and I think that has helped people make their decisions to actually go. What are some of the factors like security as an accelerator, a business that maybe might be on the slower side to migrate and start moving to a multi-cloud which a lot of businesses live in? Security also just the threat of being uberized by a smaller company that isn't taking advantage right of whether it's network automation, SD-WAN, taking advantage of the expansion of 5G. What are some of those, how are some of the security and some of those other threats? Are they catalysts that you guys are leveraging with customers to help them understand why the transition is imperative? I think they are, I think the iPhones and the laptop devices where you can click and have that immediate user experience, that's starting to build people's expectations that you can get things that quickly and for the old legacy companies that aren't willing to get in there and to start thinking about doing that migration and change, they will get left behind. It's just where the industry is today. Great, Stephanie, want to give you the, give us the takeaway from Cisco Live, Cisco plus CenturyLink, what's that mean for customers? I'm sorry, I didn't catch all that. Cisco plus CenturyLink, the takeaway for customers. Yeah, we're great partners. We've been partners for years. We continue to be partners. I think we bring a great marriage of the SD-WAN services and our hybrid network and all of our managed services together. Lots of years of experience and we love helping our customers, both of us. We want to delight and provide that great customer experience. Well Stephanie, it's been a pleasure to have you on theCUBE talking about all things SD-WAN, marketplace, the drivers, the opportunities and the benefits, we appreciate your time. Thanks so much you guys, have a great show. Thank you. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live, San Diego.