 Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando, Florida. We've got three days of program we've been doing. We're heading towards the end, but still going strong. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, John Apostolophilis, who's the vice president and CTO of Enterprise Networking and lab director of the Innovations Lab with Cisco. It all rolls right off the tongue, right, John? Yes, yes. So welcome to the program, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for joining me, it's a pleasure being here. All right, so you and I were wrapping, both have some background in networking and innovation labs, so one of the things I love to talk about, who doesn't love to talk about innovation? Tell us a little bit about your background and what are the innovation labs inside of Cisco? Okay, so I've been working in various areas of R&D and innovation for many years. And I joined Cisco about five years ago, both to be CTO and also to create a group, a lab, a group of people who will help identify and try to solve problems that are strategic importance to Cisco's future. And by doing these we believe that we can have a significant effect on our customers and bring great value to them and differentiation for Cisco. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's kind of a, you know, one of the things I poked at, I worked in a CTO office at one of the big vendors for years and it's like, you know, we need the place where people can play and learn and try. You know, it fail, it's okay. There's always the push from this, well, you know, that needs to lead to product that leads to revenue. How's that work inside of Cisco? So it actually works quite well because there's strong push from the top from Chuck Rabbin, from Dave Geckler, from my boss Scott Hurrell, my engineering colleagues, Ravi Chandler and so forth. To identify these key problems, invest, try to solve them and so forth. Because they know if we can succeed, it's going to be huge, right? So we are. Yeah. John, you know, we love when we get a CTO on. There's no shortage of cool and interesting things to look at. What are some of the main areas that you and your team look at? Sure. So one of the things which actually I, with Ravi Chandler and other very talented colleagues across Cisco started about five years ago now, was looking at what are some of the key use cases that customers need to have addressed three to five years down the road and what architectures do they need to solve it? And we started that work four or five years ago. That leads to what we call the digital network architecture, DNA, that we are hearing all about today. So that work actually started in December, 2013, with really ramp up in 2014 and 2015. And it takes so long because it takes a long time to figure out what are the real problems customers need to address and then how can you build the ASICs and the operating system and the software on top and the platforms and DNA center and now DNA center platform, that's needed. And we have a whole bunch of additional things in the pipe. Yeah, so bring us back, because in technology, three to five years, that's a really long time. That's a long time. So what were some of the original kind of customer needs that you saw and what was on target and what's changed in that time period? Sure. So some of the things the customer needed, they needed to be able to roll out new services really fast. Okay, today it takes, and historically it takes a long time to roll out a new service. Let's say we want to have a telepresence system or let's say you want to bring a new IoT device on the network and you want to segment it relative to all the other devices so it can't be any security threats and you want to apply all the best practices for network and insecurity. Typically that's been really, really hard. It's been really hard because you have to figure out for the new application what network and security requirements do you need. Then how should that, how should the network be architected? How should each device in the network be programmed for QOS or anything else? And then go out and do it. Device by device typically and then be able to look to see, hey, is it actually working the way that I intended? Or is there a problem? If so, where's the problem? How can I fix it? How can I change it? Historically that process has taken a long time. Now what we've done is by taking a more holistic view and with things like DNA Center, we have a full understanding of what's happening end to end. So we can, when we roll out a new service, we can identify both the network policies that require the security policies, figure out what's needed in each element in the network, go out and deploy it, then look to see what's happening, verify if it's doing what's needed and if not make recommended fixes and so forth. So this is one of the major fundamental shifts that has occurred and it's something we're very excited about and our customers are also really excited which is because it brings them great value, it increases their speed, it increases their security, lowers their cost, it's pretty exciting stuff. John, if I wind the clock back 10 or 15 years ago, intelligence in the network, using data and analytics in the network, we were talking about it back then. We were, we were. So tell me why it's different now. Why there we, you know, I know all the people that work on this, we're quite excited for the things that we can actually accomplish today. More than, not like we were just talking about it, we were building new real solutions, but what's different today? It's different at every single level. For example, 10 years ago, we did not really have ASICs that could be programmable. Today, with a lot of the ASICs we have, with UADP, Unified Access Data Platform, ASIC, as new protocols become important, we can go and change the firmware to support it. Our new CAT9Ks actually have x86s built in. So you have an x86, which you can have a containerized environment there. So third parties can take their applications in a container, deploy it and run it across switches. That was never possible before. So these are some of the major advances that happened. It just makes it so much easier to deploy these. Yeah, one of the things that we've been really interested to dig into is some of the new applications that aren't just running on the network, but the network is involved in how we build those environments. So when I think about the theme of the show, it's imagine what we can do, and here in the DevNet zone, it's customers talking about helping to build those applications. Talk a little bit about that. How does that tie into some of these mega trends like machine learning, AI, if you choose your favorite buzzword of choice there? Yeah, so what happens is now when you roll out a newer application, one of the key things you want is visibility to know how it's working. In the past, you've had visibility at the server. You've maybe had visibility in the client. You haven't had visibility end-to-end, and you often haven't had it real-time. With now, you can actually have end-to-end visibility, and you can be able to automatically self-optimize the network to be able to do what needs to be done. For example, here we have thousands of people just in this floor here, and you want to optimize which APs they're talking to and what paths they're taking through the network so that whatever they're doing, could it be a FaceTime or anything else, could be done with very high end-to-end quality? And all that, do you want to happen automatically? Yeah. Place I'd actually been a little critical of Cisco is when we first started talking about IoT, it was like, well, everything needs networking part of it. I'm like, well, a lot of these devices aren't going to have connectivity, we have limited connectivity. Transport isn't, you know, the piece of it, but when I take that, when I look at solutions like NFV that are coming out, all of these coming together, this great new term we're talking about edge computing. So what are you seeing? What's happening today? What are you looking at from a research standpoint? And you know, where does the edge start? Yes, so the edge is a really fun topic and it's something Cisco cares a lot about because it's often for many applications you have to run them at the edge, especially for IoT. For instance, today you mentioned IoT, you mentioned machine learning. Each of those applications, it's typically a lot of the processing, the analytics for IoT, the machine learning, AI for other sort of applications that's usually done in the cloud. However, many times you can't do it in the cloud or you don't want to do it in the cloud because it's too expensive or you just can't get things to the cloud. Yeah, if I'm driving an autonomous vehicle, I can't wait for it to do the round trip, you know, before I hit whatever that was. Yes, so that's a great point because what happens is there's a latency issue. There's also scalability. Scalability in the amount of data that's coming for a single IoT device or in a place like this, you may have thousands of IoT devices, so huge scalability issues. Also reliability, you want your systems, your IoT applications, everything to work and usually you're counting on being connected to the cloud but in case you're not connected, in case something break down and a storm, a backhoe takes out, changes their connection, you still want it to work. So for reliability, you also want to do things at the edge. Also for privacy, you see for privacy, what happens is you want to limit the information that you send to the cloud and if it's possible not to send anything or just to summarize and send on all only a very small part of the information that could lead to major gains in privacy. So doing processing at the edge, especially with machine learning AI can lead to improvements in scalability, lower latency, improved reliability, lower costs and improvements in privacy. So lots of gains by doing things at the edge of the network. Okay, and where does Cisco play in some of these edge solutions? Ah, yes, so first of all, Cisco has been building compute at the edge with our ISRs for many years, okay? I view this as one of the hidden gems that Cisco has. Also we've been working on what we call fog computing for many years. Actually, I joined Cisco five years ago but even before that, my colleagues realized that hey, for some IoT applications you can't do it in the cloud, you actually have to do it in the edge and so they coined the term fog which basically means taking a part of the cloud, bringing it to the edge of the network and a cloud on the ground is called fog, tends to term, and then we've been developing ever since. And so this is what led to us including, for example, x86s and containerized frameworks on switches and so forth, so it makes it much easier for developers to deploy things at the edge of the network. Yeah, we just have to make sure our enterprises don't choke on it because then it would just be smog. Luckily, we're working really hard on that and also to make it very secure because that's another key component. High scalability, privacy, reliability, low cost, and security. Okay, no smog. No smog. What are some of the things, it gives a little insight into the innovation labs. What are some of the things that you look out that maybe we're not yet talking about on the show floor here? Sure, for example, some of the major things upcoming is 802.11ax, it's the next generation of Wi-Fi. So it gives significant improvements in Wi-Fi performance. We've been working on that for a number of years with, when I say we, it's myself and other colleagues throughout Cisco, so it's, and often colleagues in universities and standards organizations and other companies, whatever, it makes sense because we're trying to push the industry forward. So 802.11ax is a major effort we're working on. Also 5G cellular, you may have heard a lot about it because it's getting a huge amount of attention. And we're also trying to connect these too because for example, in indoor environments like this, Wi-Fi is going to be, Wi-Fi is the best solution. On the other hand, as you take your mobile device and you go outside, you have 5G, or you will have 5G. As a concrete example, you're familiar with network segmentation. This is incredibly powerful. It's very good for security, for giving applications the bandwidth and latency they need and so forth. So very, very powerful. DNA provides that capability within the campus, WAN branch, cross-wired and wireless. And that's what we're shipping today. What happens is with 5G, as defined by three GPP standards, in, when they come out, you're going to have something very similar. It'll be called network slices instead of network segmentation. The exact same concept and it'll be provided on service fighter networks. And now what you can do is you can use DNA center to set up the policies and network segment to go across the enterprise campus and also on the service fighter network. So when you go outside with your mobile devices, wherever you are, you'll still have your network segment with your security, your QoS and so forth they need for applications. Yeah, John, I'm just sitting here smiling because I worked in telecom back in the 90s and they were the trucking companies that is like my phone was a walkie-talkie and then it was also a cell phone which was pretty cool back in the 90s. But when we talk about data, that's been the ultimate promise. It should be ubiquitous. 5G, working with the wireless has been an interesting thing to kind of dig into. So how long till that becomes reality? Well, in the enterprise, indoors, campus branch, WAN and so forth and going to data center. We're working with our data center team very closely to build the network segments across both. That's in some cases already available today in other cases, it'll be coming in six months or so forth. With 5G, it depends on the deployment of 5G. And so that's 2020, 2021. But we're already working to make that possible. All right, John, I want to give you the final word. I've worked on some of those projects when it's kind of years in the making and something comes out the door and then that's what you have with the DNA solution. Tell us a little bit about the celebration, the pride, the excitement that the team's seeing. Yeah, it's a whole lot. Right now it's a great time because as you mentioned, we started some of this work four years ago. We brought some of it out, SDA and DNA Center last summer. Assurance in January, IOT, DNA for IOT recently. We just brought out the world's best AP with 4D800. So it's all these secrets of things that finally came out that we've been working on for years. So it's really an awesome feeling and there's a lot more in the pipe. And so it's going to be a fun, fun future ahead. And I think our customers are going to get a lot of value. John Apostolophilus, really put pleasure. Thank you for joining in. You're now part of the CUBE alumni here where we always love talking about innovation, driving that pipeline to help customers through all of these new technologies. Stay with us. Got a couple more interviews left. Three days wall-to-wall coverage here in Orlando, Florida. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.