 Live from Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE. Covering DevNet Create 2019, brought to you by Cisco. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Mountain View, California for theCUBE's coverage of Cisco DevNet Creates, a small, intimate event where we're bringing the cloud-native creation world with the DevNet community within Cisco. And of course, building applications, programming networks. That's the theme. I'm John Furrier, your host. Our next guest is Daryl Sladden, Senior Technical Product Manager at Cisco, 20-year veteran, built voice-over IP systems. He's a coder, he's a builder, he's a creator. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here. And you're being on theCUBE. You're on theCUBE. Because... And the trivia behind that, share the context. You had a product, you built one. Yes, the first product management job at Cisco was at building the Cisco Unified Border Element. And of course, that became theCUBE. So anytime you mention CUBE inside of Cisco, that's going to be my product. The renaissance within Cisco. The CUBE is back and we're embedded in there. Of course, we're breaking all the borders down, getting the data. Tell us what's going on in your world. Obviously, you've seen a lot of waves in voice-over IP that you were involved in. That took the old PBX telephone, got digital, created massive innovation. That's an inflection point moment. We're seeing a few of those big waves happening now. One of them is an architectural change around IoT, Wi-Fi 6, 5G, cloud computing, all coming together. This is an interesting opportunity. What's your focus? Where do you fit into all that? Yeah, where I fit in is this is a massive change. And one of the problem sets that hasn't been solved yet is how do I understand where I am indoors? There's been great solutions that have been unlocked hugely with values with the GPS system outdoors. You always know where you are on ways to find out exactly the right. I'm always amazed at how accurate they are and how long it's going to take me to get to the computer museum. But how do I know, once I've got into the museum, that the cube is in the upstairs in the back corner? That's where we need to solve that problem. And I think we're at the crux of that. Waze is a great example, because one of the things I'm amazed by with Waze is how fast they report the incidents that are going on. It's as if people are so actively rabid of adding input in the data. You got data junkies adding it. And there's been some side effects. The side streets are always clogged. The streets are always nowhere that. So in physical locations where Wi-Fi 6, for instance, comes out, you're going to have new capabilities in bandwidth and throughput and coverage areas, these dense areas. It's going to create a navigation opportunity for either machines, the machines, machines to humans, humans to machines, humans to humans, within a physical construct. What is the, how do you see that evolving? Use cases, what's the pattern? What I really see evolving is taking advantage of some of the capabilities that have already existed in Wi-Fi, meaning ranging from individual APs. But some of the new things that are coming with Wi-Fi 6 is the Wi-Fi 6 creates a great baseline, but there are new things where 802.11 MC, for example, which is an extension of Wi-Fi 6, has what's called fine timing measurement. I can now, with these super accurate chip sets, know the speed of light is about one nanosecond to go about three feet. If I have an accurate clock, now I can know how far I am from the APs and I can solve that in indoor locations. So a lot of physics involved. All right, so what products are you working on now to make all this happen? Take us through some of the things that are out there that you've got your fingers on. Yeah, so what I'm working on is a new, is our Cisco's new location platform. It's called Cisco DNA Spaces. And so what we're focusing on is digitizing that indoor space. So people spend most of their economic activity or indoors, whether it's in a hotel, where they're selling the rooms or a restaurant, where they're selling food inside the spaces, but what goes on in that physical space? People don't have that same level of knowledge that you do on the web, right? When I go to a webpage and I shop for outdoor furniture, the next two weeks I'm followed by ads about outdoor furniture. But if I go to Home Depot and I spend an hour on the outdoor furniture aisle, they don't know about that. Now it allows you to digitize that indoor space and provide that context for other types of applications. So the value, I mean, I'm not saying that now they're going to know you actually shop at Home Depot, now your ads go to Home Depot. But the value is not so much in the advertising, it's really in the efficiencies around work, play, office, these are the things that are going to be impacted because, you know, take healthcare for instance, manufacturing, how people do work, how services are delivered. Just like in the consumer side, we all relate to the iPhone days when, oh my God, I can have GPS on a phone and things now I do a mashup on a Google map. Are you saying the same thing for buildings we're going to import? Are you going to import like architectural drawings? How do you get all this built out? What's the playbook? Yeah, the playbook really will be starting at the larger buildings that will be put into Google maps or put into other places where I can start to get really accurate indoor locations and then never losing things, right? Be able to know where you are indoors, be able to always find your stuff, not only where you are, but maybe I put a tag on some of my assets and I always know where they are. The idea of nurses becoming more efficient because they're going to know where that wheelchair is if I need to find a wheelchair to move a patient out of an office. All of these things just become a little bit more efficient but that just builds on a huge scale when that happens at scale. Darrell, talk about the impact of this because you've built and deployed disruptive technology in the past for the folks watching, whether it's an enterprise architect or a CIO or CEO or facilities manager, whoever, what is the impact of these new location-based services to their business? How should they be thinking about it holistically? Yeah, so my real view is that you want to look at it from a platform. So you're not going to have one company, we're in a Cisco, we're not going to solve every application but what you do want to do is build a platform that's extensive, right? So we will take in data from multiple sources, whether it be APs or video cameras, other things, create a platform that normalizes that location and then opens that up. Really, that's what happened as the mainframes transitioned to client server computing. Once you start breaking things up, that's really the value. And so I think the CIOs and architects out there shouldn't be looking at point products as much as understanding that a location platform will help them unlock the value moving forward. Tell us about the data. How is the data traversing through this? Because as you mentioned, connecting things like cameras and other things, what could be medical equipment, could be anything, IOT is going to be a tsunami of opportunity. Applications are going to create a lot of opportunity. Where, how should I think about the data flow and the role of machine learning and data in all this? Is that going to be a key part of this? Absolutely, the way that we're looking at it is there's kind of two groups. There's the ones that are all in on the cloud. And we are offering this as a software, as a subscription service. So you buy it on a subscription basis and you let Cisco deal with the problems. Of course, with a regulated environment of access to the data and backing it up and restoring it and making sure it's well curated. Or you could decide that I want to run it on-premises. If you run it on-prem, you have to understand you're going to have to deal with those same problems of backup. The data will get really large as you start to collect more and more location. And how are you going to best extract value from that data? So I think you won't really want to look at that. This is something that's going to continue to expand. And do I want to make that a core confidence by running it myself? Or maybe turn that over to Cloud. So in terms of what's real and what's not real? Or what's coming and what's real today? So you mentioned there's some location services as a SaaS. Is, talk about what's available now from your customer standpoint. What can they get going on and what's coming around the corner? Yeah, so what they can get going on today is that location services, Cisco DNA Spaces. So if you go to CiscoDNAspaces.com, there's free trials available. It's a great sort of application. But more importantly, it provides you that initial start. What's coming is more and more applications that take advantage of that. We've had a great one for things like student success. So that you know a student is inside of a classroom and then that if he doesn't come up to class for a couple days in a row, oh, maybe he needs counseling. Maybe his car broke down. I can start to do these really interesting student success applications as an example of a vertical. So the vertical applications are starting to really proliferate, but what's available today is the platform. So you see verticals really booming on this. They're going to take advantage of it. All right, so just kind of zoom out and put your industry hat on, not your Cisco hat. When you look at Wi-Fi and 5G or other technologies that are out there, what's the big movement? What moves the ball down the field the most? Is it going to be Wi-Fi and 5G? Because it seems like the inch by inch unified communication seems stalled now. It's got an uplift with cloud, with data, or more great user experiences. SD Win has been around for a long time and getting a resurgence. I mean, campus networking has been around for a long, long time. I mean, people go to stadiums, want to do Instagram and do videos. What's the big technology lever here? What's the big tailwind for location-based and building stuff? So what I start to see for this is improvement standards and improving accuracy. Right, until you get to that point where it's reliable and replaceable and I can really depend on it, it's all a niche product. I think that's been happening for literally the last eight years in this industry. There's lots of niche examples of things that have been successful, but it hasn't exploded. Until you build that platform where I can absolutely, with reliability, say this device is at this point at this time, then you can start to really explore. The timing and the throughput to your point earlier. Okay, thoughts on DevNet, just to wrap up. What's here going on in the show here? DevNet Create, Susie did a good job of bringing communities together. A lot of co-creation, they're creating new things, new application environment, programmable. What's your thoughts on DevNet? Yeah, I love being around some of the smartest people in the world here. It's great, humbling us to be able to talk to some of these guys, but I do think that really creates the community that teaches everything from little things, like we learned about a, I learned a quick, great new little API trick that I hadn't learned, and maybe I taught some people some of the stuff that we're doing about streaming APIs. What I really like about this is all these small little interactions build something really good. And you build APIs into all the products that's only going to create more enablement, more creativity, the creativity's flowing big time. Terrell, thanks for coming on. Great to see you. Thanks to the Cube Fan, author of the product called theCUBE. It's just go back on the day. I'm John Furrier, back with more live coverage to this short break.