 Hello everyone, welcome back to Cisco Live 2023. Dave Vellante with John Furrier. We're wrapping up our second day. We've had all the execs on. Oh, big theme around simplification. AI injected everywhere into Cisco's security cloud, their network cloud, their collaborative cloud. Cloud's everywhere, John. Bob O'Donnell is here. He's the president and chief analyst at Tech Analysis Research. Friend of the Cube, Bob. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate it. Great to get you inside the room at MWC. I think COVID in the family, hopefully you got it. Okay, so. Yeah, literally, well, my wife got it and I got it eight hours before the flight. I got a positive test. I'm like, you've got this. Jeff Gaffigan was hilarious today. I got COVID, that was good. But anyway, so welcome to the Cube. We want to talk about Cisco, Big Apple Developer Conference this week. You participated, so we want to get your angle there. Cisco somehow, they really won't say is involved, so we want to get you to actually make a statement. It was totally clinical and couched. Well, I mean. Almost like, don't look here. Well, but the thing is, I will tell you, since you brought that up just to quickly mention, during the keynote, Cisco and WebEx logos came up twice, right? So, and then, this is the Apple keynote. Now, there were Zoom and Teams logos too, but the point was, they said, look, we're going to bring these collaborative applications to Vision Pro. And then, of course, we heard G2 this morning into the day two keynote say, we're going to have WebEx on Vision Pro. And that's about all we said, but they did say it. And then yesterday, they also talked about the fact that for one of their services, and now I'm spacing out the name, they're going to have essentially no Apple client required. It's going to be all on the back end, but you'll be able to get access to their smart, it's the service that allows you to basically run an app and it knows, do I have to go over a VPN, or is it a SaaS app, or do whatever I need to do? For most machines, you're going to have to install a client, but for all the Apple stuff, they figured out a mechanism to do that in the back end, so you don't have to do anything. So clearly, the only way that kind of stuff works is if there's some deep collaboration between Apple and Cisco. So they see it as an opportunity. Now, how many Vision Pros are going to actually sell so little matter? That's a whole separate question. We can get to in a second. What's notable though is that the device itself looks like a ski goggles, still kind of better form factor than the big bulky headset, but it's the display technology, some of the tech behind Cisco, telepresence, there's a lot of stuff going on that's not just, I mean, WebEx, I was being polite to G2, I think the name should be changed, but it's not just WebEx, it's a lot under the covers. And people I think misunderstand that, right? People think, oh, WebEx and Zoom and Teams, why does Cisco even bother? Collaboration is so much more. We saw that today. What did you think of that demo that G2 gave? The telepresence, the whole, you know, the conference room. Yeah. Is that unique in the industry? It is absolutely unique, but I, look, we're doing video. We know how video works. Like, you don't just magically get shots, you know, from different places without like six cameras in that room. Yeah, yeah. And so I keep, and I saw that demo, I had been pre-prevented on it before, and I raised that question to them. I'm like, guys, like, how are you gonna do that? We said the same thing, like NFL replays? Yeah, it's like, I mean, yeah, exactly. And those NFL replays, they got like eight gazillion cameras. But obviously, conceptually, very cool, right? Yeah, working at home, you're not gonna have three Robo games that cost eight grand a piece. I mean, you're not, and you're not even gonna have that in most conference rooms. But, look, the fundamental thing that they're trying to achieve, which is to break down the serious problem that everybody's having now, which is, you know, if there's six Hollywood squares and then the room, that's a horrible experience, right? It was great during the pandemic when there were nine Hollywood squares, or 12, or even 1,000, whatever, but not 1,000, but you don't want to meet. But as soon as you start to do that combination of the Hollywood squares and then the room, it's like, oh, man, I can't hear the room. I can't see who's talking in the room. It's a terrible experience. So is it, what's the play there then? Is it just sort of demonstration of innovation, or is it actually, you think, a real business? No, it's demonstration of innovation, because obviously what they're now starting to do is they've got a higher resolution camera to start with so they can put a 4K camera in and then they can split it up, you know, intelligently. So they've got some AI stuff in the background, figuring this out, how to split up the view so that they can concentrate on the activity so that they still have a reasonable amount of resolution. It's sort of like, you know, there's this idea of foveated rendering in a headset where depending on where you're looking, you know, you get higher resolution. I'm guessing there's some sort of the inverse of that with these cameras where they're looking at it and wherever they see there's action, they're focusing a little bit more of the resolution there to do this. So now, I will say it was interesting. They had a breakfast meeting for analysts and some of their clients and I asked this gentleman from, he was a financial firm, and I said, hey, you know, what about capabilities like this? Because I'm intrigued by this ever since Cisco first showed this. He's like, you know, people like it, but it's like, yeah, whatever. I mean, so, I don't know. It's like, sometimes I get obsessed with it as an analyst and as a technologist to go, that's so cool. And then you hear these real world people are like, I don't know. But the thing is, it's also early days and he acknowledged, he said, well, look, we're still having challenges because we still haven't even outfitted all of our rooms. You've got a lot of companies that have, you know, eight-year-old Skype systems in them for God's sake, right? And those are being outfitted as people start to return to the office. So I do think, this is a long way to answer your question, I do think it's an innovation. I think it's a sellable innovation. So it is a business. You believe it's a business long-term. I absolutely think it's a business. And what's particularly good is because Cisco is unique in that their interoperability with all the other platforms is way better than any of the other guys. They recognize that, look, maybe you guys are a WebEx shop. Maybe I'm a team shop, whatever. But the point is, even with that, if I have to do a call with you, we're going to use one platform or the other that one of us doesn't have. So we live in a world where you're going to have all of that and Cisco spent a lot of time and effort, again, doing that work and they're continuing that work. What's your focus on research? Take a minute to explain to the audience what your research areas are, I see telecom, Cisco devices. What's the focus, Edge, what's your main focus? Yeah, well, it's hard to describe because I do a lot. But, you know, my background, I've been an industry analyst for almost 25 years now. And I was at IDC for a long time. And at IDC, I ran, right after you left. Yeah, it was the same year, yeah. I ran- I left that place in good shape. Yeah, you did, you did. I ran the devices research. So all the PCs, tablets, smartphones, displays, then I ended up doing a lot of semiconductor stuff because of that. And then, you know, as great as a company like IDC is, and I still have a lot of friends there, you're stovepipes, you become that person. And I saw on the horizon a lot of bigger stories happening. You know, we were heading towards things like 5G was becoming a concept. Edge computing was a concept. IoT sort of stuff, smart cars, AR and VR. IoT, industrial IoT, all that stuff. Yeah, all of that stuff. And so I felt like there were going to be bigger stories to tell, and I wanted to be able to link one thing to another. And that's where oftentimes the bigger firms fall down because they may have somebody who can go way down in the weeds in one area, somebody who else can go way down the weeds in this area, but they can't do that top level connection that actually is how the real world works. They call them stovepipes too. Yes. And John is a dot connector. He's got that superpower. So you know that. You are too. And so I never thought of that phrase, but I like it. So maybe I'll steal it. Well, it's the system. Well, I mean, this is the system's mindset. We were talking to all the Cisco executives, which I like about the executive leadership team here, is that they get the systems architecture consequence when you change something, this consequence. They're all networking guys, even Jonathan Davidson's graph talking graph databases. These guys are nerds. Yeah. I mean, they like it. And this is like, like they're into it now, Dave. So it's like, and then they're simplifying very Apple-esque in there. That Steve Jobs famous, you can see it online where he comes in and takes it over. We're going to simplify this. We've got too many products. We're going to go back to Chaya Day. Remember that moment? Yeah. That was when Apple was down really low. That was the beginning of their turnaround. And I feel like not that Cisco's turning around with the question is, can they get to a trillion? It's very Apple-like to simplify the narrative and then get everyone behind that common mission, which is a system. You got a device is connected to a network. Is it secure? What about privacy? Right. You're not talking about spectrum. You're not talking about 5G. You're not talking about plumbing. You're talking about- But they, and yet they do the plumbing to enable those other things to happen. And the thing about Cisco that I think a lot of people don't understand, and back to my research. So I've done things on 5G. I've got to study in the field on generative AI. I've done stuff on modern mobile applications. So the thing about Cisco, everybody just thinks, oh, switches, routers, blah, blah, blah, you know, old school Cisco. And obviously they've evolved quite a bit over the years, but they are inherently involved with the creation and the delivery of applications, right? Companies build applications. The nature of how those applications are built these days is, you know, it's distributed. And so it happens all over the place, which means it's not like a double click on an executable in the old days and everything just ran, right? This stuff happens all over the place and it's making those network connections happen. And then monitoring them, oh, by the way, thousand eyes, et cetera, et cetera, that is really their key to success moving forward. I want to ask you a question because we just talked about IDC stove pipes and then the platforms. Design thinking was a big, oh, design thinking was a big part of the UX movement. Now there's a whole movement brewing systems thinking. And remember back in the days, the platform wars, the internet's the platform, it's global. So there has to be some platform systems thinking in now as you design, whether it's cloud native apps, you got devices to worry about form factor. And to me, this Apple announcement where it ties together here, is that whether it's an endpoint device on the network or a ski goggle that's spatial computing or whatever you want to call it, is now just a consumption layer. So the content's going to change. The connectivity needs are going to change. The kind of policies you might want to use AI for like, oh, high bandwidth needing application right now or some sort of feature on a graphic GPU. This is all like a melting pot. Yeah, no, it absolutely is. And again, it's the inherent complexity unfortunately of the way these modern apps are built. You know, yes, it's very flexible and you got the CI CD development process. And again, we've got public cloud and private cloud and hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. So you got all these pieces all over the place and to get it to function and deliver you the actual service and experience that you want requires all that background plumbing. And that's again, that's what Cisco has been doing. And it's a super hard story to tell to be honest. And yes, they are simplifying and I think they're doing a good job. I think they have a long way to go to be fair because I think it's just that hard to really do it. So I think I just named this segment. I think I'm going to call it either four or maybe even five things people misunderstand about Cisco. So we just hit WebEx that collaboration is not just WebEx. It's not just a Zoom competitor. Or a video conferencing app. Right, right, right. Okay, the second thing is it's not just plumbing. It is plumbing, but it's also about supporting the apps, the application experience. The third thing came up on Twitter with Keith Townsend. Cisco's not a security company. Cisco absolutely is a security company. And then the fourth and fifth, so Silicon Chops. You know Silicon, you and I talk about that. Get into it. And the fifth is a maybe, I want to get your guys opinion on this. Cisco doesn't have a cloud. Which, okay, they don't have a public cloud, but they've got several clouds, so we're going to call this five things people misunderstand about Cisco. I like it. I think it's good. So let's get into some other other ones. Oh, the other thing is we had a little thought exercise yesterday. We're playing around with Zeus, I think, and John and I. Can Cisco actually pull a Microsoft with Nadella or an Apple and five X its valuation get you a trillion dollar, be a trillion dollar company. Big moonshot, but you think about these areas. You think about a company with its brand and its resources. Why not? Microsoft was around the same valuation 10 years ago, 26 dollars a share. I had much more profitable, even though Cisco's incredibly profitable, they had that software, but Apple was irrelevant, right? You know that well. So what do you think about that thought exercise? It's an interesting one. I mean, look, everything is getting connected. And again, they are going to provide some of the hidden plumbing for connected cars. They've talked a little bit about that. There is the plumbing for connected devices in IoT. Now, look, IoT is taken forever and it's not really done what we all thought it was going to do, but it's getting there. Smart buildings, they're talking a lot about that, right? And all the connectivity and you know, from a sustainability perspective, from an energy consumption perspective, there's a lot of things they're doing in the background. Obviously, collaboration is going to continue to be a big thing. They've got a lot more competition there. You know, five X could be tough. I'll be honest with you. Yeah, so something's got to happen. But think, let's start with a TAM, connecting everything to make anything possible. Okay, that's a big TAM. Okay, so when I think about this, I'm like, okay, they got to execute on their existing business, of course. But then I start thinking about the edge. And that, you and I have talked about this. I remember we were on a call one time and both of us jumped on Jeff Clark. Like, why wouldn't you make your own silicon designs? So, but Cisco designs its own silicon. Maybe a lot of people don't realize that, maybe, I think a lot of people know, but they, for instance, they sell silicon to others as well. Including hyperscalers. Yeah, so what are your thoughts? And I don't know if they're just not talking about it publicly, but what are your thoughts on them doing potentially, as we've talked about, arm at the edge? Right. You know, for AI inferencing and IoT. That could be very interesting. Obviously, the silicon one stuff that they've done has primarily been about moving data bits around and, you know, across networks and what have you. You know, the other thing we haven't thrown out yet, you know, generative AI, we haven't talked about that. And the implications that that has on moving a lot of data around. Now, sometimes it's just within the data center, but again, Cisco can drive that. But to your point about the edge, yes, if there is a mechanism by which they can help enable the creation of devices that can do inferencing on the edge, it becomes interesting. Yes, they're an arm licensee. They can absolutely leverage that. They can also leverage the fact that they are a hugely trusted partner of all the telcos. And the telcos have the physical presence of the edge. You know, there was a lot of, I'm not convinced we're really going to see things in every cell tower as I think at one point some people predicted, myself included, to be honest with you, not predicted, but at least thought was a possibility. But they do have that physical presence. And again, Cisco's working with these guys. They've got the silicon to make the connection. They can easily start to think, well, easily, but they certainly could create some kind of a processing. And is there other kinds of acceleration that they could start to think about for generative AI based edge workloads? Or video streaming or what happened? If you think about just the silicon and obviously x86 has been a huge success and now it's under fire. But if you look at what Apple's doing, and Tesla as well, and you take the combination of the CPU, the GPU, the neural processing unit, the accelerators, Moore's law grows at roughly 40% a year. We're talking about over 100% a year in terms of performance improvement. At a way lower cost, getting the tape out in nine months versus 18 to 36 months. So my point is this, the company that figures this out at the edge could potentially completely alter the economics of computing across laptops, devices, data center, other devices, headsets, and so forth. And right now I think companies like Cisco looking to go, eh, no profits in it. Just like Intel did when Jobs asked them to make a chip for the iPhone. No, and that's fair. I think part of the other challenge though, and this is what's kept some of the IoT things from happening in a big way, I think it's still a challenge for Edge is, Edge, and the notion of distributed computing is one of these things that from a philosophical and an architectural perspective seems extraordinarily elegant and beautiful. And then when you actually talk to the people trying to do the stuff, it's like, ugh, it's a mess. It is really ugly. And it's really hard. And who knows, even being able to determine what level of compute is on this edge versus that edge and what different applications are going to require, there's so much that has to be figured out. And it's not a single company's job to figure that all out. And so I think that represents a challenge not only for Cisco, honestly for all the companies trying to figure out this whole Edge idea and it's hard to find a horizontal play that's obvious. But I believe- I think what about Intel is a good one. They ignored the small form factor. They used their lens of profitability into it, which is why I think Cisco with the new platform strategy, my only open question for coming out of this event will be, what will they do to match the story? If they do, they would then align with you and say, hmm, is the Edge a platform? Right. Okay, it is. It's also a device opportunity. So okay, it was connected, it's protected? Really? And that's fair, but the other thing to bear in mind is let's look at the history of Cisco's revenue and profits that was hardware versus software versus services, right? Obviously used to be all hardware. What's it about? 30% software? I think it is. I don't know the exact number but it's growing quite a bit obviously and that's the other path toward the billion is that making that transition so that all of a sudden it's instead of an 80-20 hardware, it's an 80-20 software kind of a story. And obviously there's more margin and more profitability in software, so maybe that comes to mind. And I think CrossCloud too, we call it SuperCloud, but I think that is an opportunity. I think you agree that it's a problem that multi-cloud complexity is problematic. Take a networking, cross-cloud strategy, security, cross-cloud, you've got your weave of observability, full-stack observability through all that. You know, there's upside there. There's no, again I look at it, their vision, connecting everything to make anything possible. That's like an endless tam. No, it's true and again, I think it's, I happen to be looking at an AT&T sign, of course they had their announcement with AT&T this morning as well. Obviously just for small and medium business but it's- Unpack that a little bit. Yeah, sure, so they announced the fact that they have a new special arrangement with AT&T, specifically targeted small and medium business to do WebEx-based calling. So as they were describing it, when you had a hard line system in a small business, they're like, hey, transfer it to your phone, whatever. Now that all those phones are mobile, they need a better mechanism to do that. So they're delivering WebEx to be able to enable that across multiple devices in a small business. The other thing is you've got small businesses running credit card transactions, what have you, so they need something like SD-WAN. They don't know they need SD-WAN, they just know that they have to run secure transactions. So now, you've got this situation because AT&T and Cisco have this work together or they've created this offering but part of the reason why they created it and I got a chance to talk to John Davidson about this last night was they have an arrangement because of their IoT-based stuff and some of the connected car business has been for a long time running. So they already have the peering arrangements and all this kind of stuff with AT&T which is why they chose to go with them. So now, again, it's a different animal, it's not a big enterprise thing but obviously there are millions and millions of small businesses out there and some of them are going to need this kind of capability. I think, Dave, that's why I'm, you know, you always say, oh, I thought it was the profit that Microsoft had. The thing about Microsoft and Cisco that matched today in the pattern matching is that when Microsoft was that low, they had the old dogma, Balmer, developers, developers, MSN was nothing, there was no real, zeroes around, windows everywhere, dotnet, dotnet developers, the whole ecosystem, Visual Studio, but they had an install base with Office, they had the monopoly with Windows and they had all those customers, they had SQL Server, yeah, whatever. But they were servers, they were powering stuff. The switching costs for the customers to go to Google Docs at that time, the only real competitor, maybe something else might have been out there but it was basically Google Docs. Not really, an alternative. So Cisco's got this install base, no one's going to rip their routers out, they've run their networks so that the customers are there. If they can nurture the base, pull them bridge to the future strategy, which you saw up there, it's their theme, if they nurture their core networking product people, get them platform enabled, get them ready, and then just boom, open up the Kimono, that's the only path. But there has to be a flywheel, right? Yeah, but it's kind of, it's going to pop its head in. But from Microsoft, it was Azure, right? It was our Apple, yeah, yeah, but I'm saying to get them back to prominence, it was Azure, they built everything on Azure, the cloud they leaned in. And for Apple, it was iPhone. It took how many years with Azure? Yeah, yeah. At least six to get in the game. I'm not saying they're going to get to a trillion, I'm not saying they're ever going to get there, I'm saying what is the path? That's, it could be, it would be a decade. The path is what they laid out, I thought the story lays out a path, I can see a trillion dollars in that path. I mean, they're not talking about this, by the way, this is not a little- Security, security, four billion, 40. Yeah. Yeah, they got a 10X security. They got a 10X security, that's got to happen. Right. So the operation's a wild card, because you've got the telcos now, you can OEM that platform, get out of the WebEx retail game, be a platform. Jump in. I was just going to say, the Edge stuff that you were bringing up, though, look, the telcos, 5G is not proven to be what we were all led to believe it was going to be. Right, is anybody ever going to make money off of 5G is the joke? And so, they are, they spent a lot of money, especially here in the US, for Spectrum, right? And a lot of countries around the world, obviously, are just getting these deployments happening. And nobody's paying for slightly faster download speeds, which is all you really get right now. So they're hungry, that is the telcos, to figure out an Edge strategy, because again, they know they have the physical points of presence that nobody else can touch. So if Cisco can help somehow enable that for them, that, I think, is one of the calling cards for them to drive that. We just started a stealth initiative called theCUBE Star. It's like the Michelin Star for entertainment venues. We start with Fenway Park and we're going to go around the country and we're going to hit all the venues. But we hit the Vegas, of course, watch some sports, Dave. Right. A little bit of a viral activity. We did a speed test at the hockey game here. 5G blew away Wi-Fi. Who's running Wi-Fi in the stadium? Cisco. Cisco. Their wireless needs work. Yeah, but don't forget. 5G was overpowering. They also, let's not forget that Cisco does do some of the 5G antennas for other environments. It's not just Ericsson, Samsung Networks, Nokia, what happened. But this came up in the annals and I think you might have brought up another annals. No, it was, what's his name? Chris Lewis brought this up. Chris Lewis asked the question. I was going to ask the same question. What's the 5G relationship with Wi-Fi? Because that should be invisible to the customer. Like, if you've got 5G popping at 25 meg up and 200 down, I'm going there. You shouldn't have to turn it up in Wi-Fi. I did actually ask that question when we were getting a tour of the Cisco Stadium thing. And they were like, look, it's a coexistence thing because certain apps are going to run on 5G and certain apps are going to run on Wi-Fi. Now, there was a commentary made that, well, for the Wi-Fi, you give them your email, 5G, it's all private. So there's other trade-offs involved with some of this stuff. This is my point. This is my point because your 5G annals is what I'm getting to with 5G. This is my point about a platform. You don't know what you're going to enable. Platforms should be enabling something. What we just thought about was Wi-Fi. They're two different animals. Someone's got to make that work. Is there going to be Cisco, or are they going to enable an ecosystem party which they don't yet have? That is where they make their trillions. There's got to be a new revenue stream that pops out of nowhere. For Apple, it was the store, their commerce, their lock-in, their phones, everything clicked. Now, I'm not saying they're going to do that. That level. And I was fishing for it with something beyond applying AI to your existing businesses. I don't think they figured out yet. No, they haven't. But again, I will say back to, if we're looking for a fifth theme that you wanted to have, I will say Cisco has gone gun-hole on the generative AI stuff. Some of the things they're doing for WebEx, meeting summation stuff. Some of that stuff is super cool. And I think people are really going to find that useful. They're also doing some, I think, honestly, I think the first killer app of generative AI in the enterprise is going to be customer service. Because the ability to make any customer service agent, or frankly, to get rid of them perhaps, but to make the ones that are there all experts because of the intelligence that's built into these tools is going to be amazing. But someone has to help these companies build those. And so I was asking today, like, hey, who's going to take, so if I'm UPS and I needed a solution for my call support line, and I want to leverage the chat GPT general model, but I need to apply the UPS smarts, who's going to be the company that's going to be the teach, teaches these guys how to apply that information to it, and then leverages it through things like the calling agent stuff that Cisco has. I think that is an interesting opportunity that people are still trying to figure out who fits where into that ecosystem and that solution. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, this is exactly the way I see it. Look at Amazon, maybe another metaphor or comparable. Amazon's AC2 drives their business. That's compute, storage, queuing, the rest, and then higher level services. What Amazon did out of the gate, which set them up where they are now, is they didn't focus on the apps. They enabled app developers. Now they have apps, they have call center, they got a connect that's doing well. So I can see Amazon prefabbing some apps for SaaS consumption, no problem. But their core is not to compete with their ecosystem to a degree. Some will debate that. I mean, Snowflake is competing with Redshift, we know that. Azure, Microsoft on the other hand, and Google have a massive suite. Does Cisco go down that route? Because go down, what you're saying is like, I can see a revenue model where they flip to network as a service and get the law of small numbers in the aggregate. So if I build a killer app on network and they're taking pennies on my dollar, that's a channel. No, it's true. I mean, there's a lot of different ways some of this stuff could go, but I don't know if you guys wanted to get back to the Apple thing at all on that set. Yeah, before we do, let me just close out of this one. So I got a way for them to get to 100 billion. They're 58 billion now on a run rate basis. Take networking, which is a $30 billion business, double it, pick a time horizon, get them to 60 billion. You take their internet business, they call it internet of the future. It's like five billion now. Can you get that to 15 maybe? Three X, collab and security, if you can three X that gets to 12 and 12. That gets them over 100. Are they going to get a 10 X revenue multiple? No, could they get five to six? So that gets them five to 600 billion. And now all of a sudden, who knows what the market's going to do, but if there's some additive piece of this that comes out of generative AI that could give them another two, three, $400 billion in value, it gets to a trillion. You could collapse internet of the future with and to insecurity, that's one unit. You can collapse, optimize the application experience with collaboration, you have an app team and you got basically internet. And then you got network. So I could see it getting to half a trillion. I think there's a real path to that. The question is that Cisco, Cisco's just now thinking, John and David brought this up, they're just now thinking about synergies. No, JT Patel brought it up, he's like, he saw synergies that he didn't see in the security thing he saw. So the question is, can they have their mind open for synergies and then be agile in their team formation and saying, hey, you know what, let's put internet security with internet for the future, boom. Well, and they are, I mean, look, they're already starting to combine, and this came up today, this notion of security and observability are both going to leverage the same set of data. So they've got this data from monitoring the network stuff. They can leverage that both for security purposes as well as observability purposes. So that's a two-fer that they can leverage into. So the reason I go through this, here's that point there. So observability is critical because that also touches software supply chain. You can't have S-bombs, several of the physical materials without observability data merged in. We reported that. I mean, it's not sexy, but it's so incredibly delightful. The reason I go through all this crazy math is because we got a lot of investors in the audience, as you know, and even though we don't necessarily give advice, we like to opine or, you know, pause it. And I think that my take on this is I think they're going to be conservative. I think they'll do stock buybacks and dividends and they'll just keep going incremental and bumping it up. Maybe gets to 200, 300, you know, maybe 400 billion. But unless there's a radical change in how they allocate capital and R&D, I don't see them getting there. But the reason I bring it up is this company, well, you're right, they don't have to, which is why I think they won't. But from an investor standpoint, it's not like you're looking at NVIDIA. They're not the next NVIDIA, at least currently, but potentially something could come out of Liz's outpost, what is it? Outshift, outshift group. They renamed the incubation group. Outshift. Emerging technology. But something could potentially come out of that, that could be rocket ship. And yes, I do want to get back to Apple. Yeah, so the device, I mean, one of the things that they show, and in fact, ironically, what was kind of interesting about Apple is the first few applications they showed for Vision Pro were actually business-oriented. They were collaboration. Like Apple never does that, right? I mean, yes, they will show some business apps, but it's always like, oh, and by the way, here's all the cool sexy consumer stuff, and oh, by the way, you can do this. They actually started with some of the collaborations. Versus Facebook. Yeah, which is. Starting with the cartoons. Yeah, so. I mean, I think Tim Cook and a lot of people are like saying, don't call it a metaverse. Well, of course not. You watch, don't leave, that is failing miserably with that. Is this really transitioning? No, but. The spatial computing versus metaverse. Yeah. A lot of nuances. Yeah. There are a lot of nuances, but look, here's the deal. I did have the opportunity. I was at the event, got to see it, and I actually got to try it, all right? I spent, you've seen the reports from another other press analyst who saw it. Look, it's still a big honking thing on your face. Can you really look out the side and see so many? No, no, no, no, no. I mean, no. Because that's what they're saying, right? It has pass through, which means you're looking through it. But there's a camera feeding what you're seeing. So it's as if you're looking through it. It's obstructive, you're saying. It's obstructive. And the reason why they did that funky set of eyes on the front with a display is to make it appear as if it was clear. It's not clear. There's all kinds of electronics from the front to the back. It's jam-packed. And it's only about a pound or so. But again, you're sticking this thing on your head. You've got a thing around the back of your head, another strap across the top. And when you first put it on, you have to look at your eyes. It's like being at the optometrist. They're like, follow the dot. And that's how they track the eye tracking. So you've got to set it up. There's a fair amount of work involved to get that done. But then you can actually see around. And you can dial in and out the amount of screen. So you have a giant screen if you want. You can have them in a weird way. At the end of the day, Vision Pro is a massive monitor. It's a massive virtual monitor to show whatever you want. Will it ever be like my sunglasses that I ride with? Hopefully, because here's, you know, I did some research years ago. I mentioned I do research. That's part of what I do that's a little bit different than some other folks. And I did a study on AR and VR headsets. Now, admittedly, this was older generation stuff. But what I found was the average session time that people would have with these devices was like 38 minutes or something like that, right around 40 minute mark. Because it's just kind of overwhelming. And even the Apple thing, it's, I mean, the screen is incredible. It's a face computer. Two 4K displays. It's a face computer. It's a face computer. You're absolutely right. And the problem is it just gets a little overwhelming. And they did a great job. They have this new custom chip called the R1 that's designed to take all the sensors and avoid delays because other headsets, if you would move, you'd get this weird delay and that would contribute to motion sickness. Apple seems to have done a pretty good job. But when they started showing these immersive videos where you're standing on a mountaintop looking straight down or whatever, it's still like, it's a little much, you know? I describe it as hyper realistic. And your brain can only handle so much visual information before you're like, oh, nope, nope. Uncle. Yeah. And so, I mean, again, they've thought about this. Remember that meme where Mark Zuckerberg's walking down the alley and everyone's got the goggles on? It was a Samsung event. I was at that event when that happened. So what was going on around the internet was Tim Cook would not be seen wearing one. And the Bloomberg reporter wrote, and I got massive tweets and Mike would comment, why isn't Tim Cook wearing one? Avoiding the meme explosion. Because everyone would take it. Did you imagine Tim Cook put one of those on? Because he did put one on. Well, but then you wonder what the unintended consequences of having this face computer on all the time. You remember the movie Steve Martin that I think it was called The Jerk? Yeah. And the guy invented OptiGrab. Oh, yes. And then it went bust because everybody who used it went cross-eyed. That was the unintended consequence. So your brain's going to explode. Here's the thing. I'm saying all these things in these concerns. You're going to play and you want to watch a movie, maybe. But of course, as long as it's not more than two hours, because otherwise your battery will run out. Which is a liar. Price is too high. Price is high. The thing is. You have those for developers, right? Right, it is. And let's not forget, the number of people who misjudged Apple on several other products is enormous. You can't write Apple off because it's Apple. And they know what they're doing. They're not idiots, right? It does feel maybe, like in this case, though, that it's going to be a lot tougher. Because I do think the experience is something that's more of a gimmick. It's super cool. Like the first time you try it. For me, it's the goggles factor. Will it be a meaningful part of their business? You think of the Apple watch? No, it's not the Apple watch. But think of the Apple watch. What percent of their business is Apple watch? Well, now it's decent. But the first Apple watch, it was like, eh. Yeah, but even then. But an Apple watch is a main category player. They sold six or seven million, I think. Apple watch is the first year. They sold like 10 or 11 of the first iPhones. They sold a lot, many millions of those. I said in the cube, I would never put a toothbrush in my ear, hanging from my ear. And guess what? I fucking... Exactly. I know. I've eaten crow on that many times. Well, and that's the thing a lot of people eat. It got better. I mean, this is the current version. They're awesome. Yeah, and a lot of people have eaten crow on misjudging Apple. So, you know, take everything I say with a certain rate of salt because, but you know, I've been following the company very closely for a long time. And I think I have a sense of the sort of gestalt and the way they think about things. And I see where they're coming from. I, you know, at the end of the day, where does this go next? Honestly, the form factor's going to be worked on. Well, but it's going to take a while. But at the end of the day, I call it the best implementation and the best technology for a category that nobody wants. And that's the issue. It's like, it's amazingly engineered, all kinds of thought and detail went into it. But I'm just, again, you can't get past that thing. It's a thing on my face. When was the last big Apple product that was revolutionary or impactful? iPhone was obvious. What products? Well, I mean, iPad was a big deal. iPad was a huge deal. The watch was a big deal. But I mean, again, they've had a few, I mean, how many people have home pods? Not too many, right? I mean, there are things that Apple's done that have not proven to be that big of a deal. Their smart home stuff in general never went anywhere. They really never quite pulled that one off. Part of it was because they were charging everybody, excuse me, to license their protocols, but so we'll see. It's not like Apple hasn't had a few missteps along the way. They have. This is just a super high-profile thing. And so, but to your point, they're going to, obviously they're going to reduce the physical size. They're going to cut down the resolution of the displays. They'll probably lose that front display for certain other applications. They'll do a number of things, I think, to get it down, but, you know. What do you think Apple has got enough props for? Security. I mean, their security's damn good. It's starting to market. Their security's damn good. Hey, let's bring it back to Cisco. Yeah, it's good. It's a good segment. What do we want to see? Okay, so we saw these announcements. We saw the networking cloud, the security cloud, a lot of innovations in collaboration, full stack observability, stretching across the whole portfolio. Very few hardware announcements, so firewall announcements, but that's about it. What do we want to see next year at Cisco Live? I'll go first, I'll let Bob close out. So I think what I want to see is I want to see them have the sizzle and the steak. I want to see, I love the positioning, I love, and I see a path to a trillion dollars making some assumptions that something will pop out there, but generally the bones are there to a trillion. If they can, if things pop, if they don't get siloed, if they don't get too dogmatic, state open as a platform company would do, I think it's a trillion dollars. Get the steak from the sizzle, and then they got to just deliver and execute, right? They got to execute and they got to have their eyes open for that next corner. They got to be, because platforms put you in a position and they install base, if they just listen to their customers and get in and nurture them, secure them, listen to them and build with them, they can invent stuff, and I think that's key. And finally, I'd like to see them get a developer ecosystem and a partner ecosystem that's actually producing game-changing products. To me, that would be like a killer mission statement and keep bringing the goods, more announcements than shipping, not vapor, deliver, and they're going to do good. They deliver in what they did, they, they will, now Jesus, we're delivering, but like, there's a lot of stuff under the covers, SD-WAN stuff, plumbing, it's not that easy to make magic. No, it's not. And you know, look. What's your take? My take is that I would love to see them continue to focus on improving the overall experience of delivering applications. And they started with this customer delivery, you know, application delivery management stuff that, you know, I think that's going to be important, but I want to see them go beyond the simplification to even productize some things to make it easy. Again, why shouldn't I get a complete call center solution with built-in generative AI training tools that I can hand to a company, they install it, it sucks in all their data and it all of a sudden creates these amazing, you know, call center stuff. Again, they hinted at that with the call center agent things. I would love to see more of that. And then I'd love to see them do something with the carriers around the edge and might come in several different forms. There might be some hardware, but certainly there's going to be some services and some things that the carriers can leverage their physical points of presence and do additional things that Cisco is enabling. So I'd like to see more of those kind of finished or nearly finished solutions. I think you guys made some excellent points and I agree with the developer piece in particular on top of the platforms. And I really like what you said about the edge. I would add, I'd love to see more ecosystem action around the edge. That's something I want to see. And I think I want to see, you know, some consistent predictable growth out of the company. I think they're long-term growth. I think it's either six or nine percent. I can't remember. I'd like to see that. I'd like to see collaboration get back to growth now that it's a platform. Same thing with security. I'd like to see double-digit growth, like not just 10%. I'd like to see 20% growth there and see that trajectory that's consistent. And that's what I'll be looking for. At least the starting point a year from now. All right, John, awesome. Great job, Dave. Bob, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks. Thanks for having me, guys. This is a wrap. Our last day here, we're cutting out. Now listen, go to siliconangle.com. We've got all the news there. Thecube.net is where we keep all the videos. Big month coming up, right? We're in Anaheim next week. We've got, gosh, let's see, we've got HPE. You're at Mongo. We've got Snowflake. We're going to be at Databricks. We've got SuperCloud coming up in mid-July. So check all the action out. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and our guest, Bob O'Donnell. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time on theCUBE.