 Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hi everybody, welcome back to Barcelona. This is Cisco Live. And I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. And you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Dr. Thomas Shearer is here. He's the chief architect of Talindus Luxembourg. And David Cope is back. He's the senior director of marketing development for the Cisco cloud platform and solutions group. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So you're very welcome. So Talindus, tell us about Talindus. So Talindus, we are actually an integrator, a cloud operator and a technical company. And we are partnering over the years with Cisco and with all the products that they have, notably. And lately we are moving also into the public cloud. We have private cloud offering, but we see a first appetite coming up with our customers in the public cloud, which are heavily regulated industries. And there we are working notably with a team of Dave to have an offering there that enables them to move into the cloud. So these guys are a customer or a partner? Well, you know what's special about them. They're actually both. So they're a big customer of Cisco offerings, cloud center and other offerings, the Cisco container platform, but they also use those to provide services to their customers. Exactly. So they're a great sounding board about what the market needs and how our products are working. Yeah, so Thomas, Talindus has been around since, if I saw right, 1979. So we weren't talking multi-cloud back then, but it is a big discussion point here at the show. You said private, public, you're using cloud center. Maybe explain to us what multi-cloud means to you and your customers today. I would say most customers that we have are large organizations. We manage the IT infrastructure. We are also doing integration projects, but those customers, they are normally not really technology companies. You know, they are searching to work with us because we deal with a good part of their IT operations. So at these companies, they come from a private infrastructure. They have their, these days, their VMware installation, their private clouds. And I think also it will stay like this for a good amount of time. So there's no good reason to just go into the cloud because it's fancy or because there's something that you cannot have, certainly there is, but that's a stable progress that they are following. So what we need is actually to catch the low-hanging fruits that exist in the public cloud for our customers. But in such a way that it satisfies their day-to-day IT operations. And sometimes it's our IT operations who is doing that since we are managing this. So for us, actually the hybrid cloud, to say it short, is actually the standard. So multi-cloud. So I wonder, we're almost two years into GDPR, one year into the owner's fines. How has GDPR affected you and your customers and what's it like out there these days? GDPR is for me not the main reason for public, private, multi-cloud installations for us. And that involves GDPR is the regulation that we are in. So our customers are notably from the financial sector and they're very strict on conservative security rules for good because their main business is they are selling trust. There is not much more business where you trust that much than a bank. They know everything about you and that's something they cannot sacrifice. Now in Europe, we have the advantage that there is that strict regulation which puts kind of standouts. And that involves obviously also the GDPR thing. But if I look into that standard that regulation imposes and it's very technical. They say for example, please make sure if you move into the clouds, then avoid a lock-in. Be confident on what will be your exit cost, what will be your transition cost and don't get married to anyone. And that's where Dave's team comes into the game because they provide that solution actually. That's music to your ears, I would think. I mean, that's to be honest, if I were a public cloud provider, I'd say, no, don't do multi-cloud. We have one cloud, it does it all, but no customer speaks like that. No, you're right. And I think to me what I love about to lend us in the way they use the product is they work in such a highly regulated environment where policies, managing common policies across very different environments becomes critical. So how do I manage access control and security profiles and placement policies all across very different multi-cloud environments? That's hard and that's been one of the cornerstones that we've focused on in cloud center. Yeah, so let's double click on that because we were talking to a guest earlier and I was asking them, sort of poking at, there's a lot of people who want that business because it's a huge business opportunity and some big well-established companies. Cisco's coming at it from a position of strength which is, of course, the network. But I'll ask you the same question. What gives you confidence that Cisco is in the best position for customers to earn the right to manage their multi-cloud data and environment? No, I think it's a great question. I mean, from my perspective, I actually love our customer's perspective, but if you think about Cisco's heritage around the network and security, I think most people would agree they're very strong there. It's a very natural extension to have Cisco be a leader in multi-cloud because after all, it's how do I securely connect very diverse environments together? And now, a little further now, how do I help customers manage workloads, whether they be existing or new cloud native workloads? So we find it's a very natural extension to our core strengths and through both development and acquisition, Cisco's got a very, very broad and deep portfolio to do that. So your thoughts on that? Yeah, Cisco is coming from a networking history, but if you now look into the components, there is actually, yeah, the networking foundation. There is UCS, which we have, for example, in our infrastructure, that's Hyperflex. There are then solutions like CCP that you can run a DevOps organization, can combine it with Cloud Center to make it hybrid. And just today, I learned a new thing which is Kubeflow that I just recognized. Cisco is the first one that is coming up with a platform as a service-enabled private cloud. So if you go private cloud, we usually talk about running VMs. But now with CCP and this open source project, Kubeflow, which I think will be very interesting to see in conjunction with CCP. And I heard that this is going to happen. You're actually, Cisco is the first one delivering such a solution to the market. So it's a growth that just happened within the organization. Kubeflow for the CNCF. It's the Kubernetes flow, right? We don't have to send a season to CIS letter. Right. And CCP, they'd be in the Cisco container platform. We announced that some while ago. It's an on-prem Kubernetes stack. So Thomas, the update on Cloud Center suite now, it's containerized, it's got microservices, built with Kubernetes underneath and using Kubeflow. I'm guessing that's meaningful to you. There's a lot of things in this announcement that it's like, okay, it sounds good, but in the real world, what are you super excited for? The containerization, I would think things like the action orchestrator and the cost optimizer would have value, but please tell us yourself. The Cloud Center was already valuable before. We did an investigation about what kind of cloud prokering and cloud orchestration solutions exist. Back in those days when it was called Clicker Cloud Center and me and my colleagues know the Clicker team back then as well as now as a Cisco, we appreciated that they became one family. Now, for me, Cloud Center fulfills certain requirements that I simply have to fulfill for our customer and it's a mandatory fact that I have to fulfill them like, being able to ensure and guarantee portability. Implementing through policies, segregation of duties where necessary and things like that. I have to say now that it becomes containerized adds a lot of ease in managing Cloud Center as a solution by itself. And also you have the flexibility to have it better also migratable. It's an important key point that Cloud Center is a non-cloud-centric product that you can run it on-prem, that your orchestration, that you don't have to log in on the orchestration layer, can have it on-prem, but now can easily move it on things such as GKE because it's a container-based solution, but I think also there's a SAS option available so you can just subscribe to it. So you have the full range of flexibilities so that the day-to-day management workflow engine doesn't become a day-to-day management thing by itself. So I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of your environment since 1979. So you must have a lot of stuff, a lot of IT that you've developed over the years. But you mentioned that you're starting to look at public clouds. You just mentioned GKE. Your customer base, largely financial services, so they're highly regulated and maybe a little nervous about the cloud. But so paint a picture of your, maybe not for certain workloads, paint a picture of your environment and sort of where you want to go from an architecture and an infrastructure perspective. We have an own, what we call private-managed cloud, that's a product we call Uflex, which is the flex port reference architecture that's Cisco, it's networking, NetApp Storage, Cisco UCS in conjunction with SWE Mware as a compute. This we use since many years and as I already have said, the regulated market started opening up towards public clouds. So what does it mean? European Banking Authority, so EBA, who's the umbrella organization on European level, they send out a recommendation, dear countries, please, your financial institution, if they go into the cloud, they have to do A, B, C. The countries have put in place those regulations, they have put in place those controls and for them, they are mostly now in that, let's investigate what is infos in the public cloud. They come from their private infrastructure. They are in our infrastructure, which is like a private infrastructure, virtualized and managed by us, mainly VM based, and now the new thing on top that they investigate are things like big data, artificial intelligence and things like that, which you mostly don't have in private infrastructure. So that combination is what we have to provide to our customers, but they are mostly in an investigative mode. Okay, and Cisco is your policy engine, management engine across all those clouds, is that the... Yes, we are able to manage those workloads with Cloud Center. Sometimes it depends also on the operating model. The customer himself is the one using Cloud Center. So it depends, since we are an integrator, a cloud operator and also offer services in the public cloud, it's always the question about who has to manage what. And yeah. One of the things that I just add on that we see people providing our products as a service, we're just talking about Kubernetes. Customers today are starting to move Kubernetes just from being like development now into production. And what we're seeing is that these new Kubernetes based applications have non-containerized dependencies, reach out to another traditional app, reach out to a PaaS, a database. And what we try to do is to say, how do you give your customers the ability to get the new and the old working together? Because it'll be that way for quite some time. And that's a part of sort of the new Cloud Center capabilities also. That's a valid reason. So you have those legacy services and you don't want just to... You cannot just replace them now. Now let's go all in, let's be cloud native. So you have always these interoperability things to handle and yeah, that's true actually. You can build quite some migration path using containerization. Yeah, I mean, a customer can't just over rotate to all the new fun buzzwords. They got a business to run. Yeah. So, okay. And how do I apply security policies and access control and to this very mixed environment now? Common policies and that becomes challenging. But that's also part of our business. Yes, they are for example, financial institution and not an IT company. That's where we come in as a provider towards such an industry. And there we highly value the partnership with Cisco where we can build new services together. We had that earlier adopters program for example regarding CCP. So Cisco is bringing us as a service provider into the loop to build what's just right for the customer for them on their behalf. Yeah, so you described that as very challenging as it's in some cases it's chaos but that's the opportunity I heard this morning that you guys are going after pretty hard. No, it's right. I mean, you've got one set of desires for developers but now we move into production. Now IT gops gets involved, the CISO gets involved and how do we have then well thought out integrations into security and network management. Those are all of the things that we're trying to really focus on. Well, we're at the DevNet zone. So you were surrounded by infrastructure as code. And it fits in cloud well. Guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and telling your story, really appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoyed it. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, buddy. Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante, we're live from Cisco live Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back.