 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone, we are here in Orlando, Florida, theCUBE for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman's my co-host for the next three days. Our next segment is the Meraki team we have. Joe Hainline who's with WWT, is a product manager in Courtney Batiste who's the Meraki Solutions Architect. Welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. So we've got the engineering, we've got the application, we've got the use cases. Meraki's really, really picking up a lot of steam. It's very cloud-scale, very cloud-native, bringing the enterprise perspective to it, which is a really big challenge right now around how do I get enterprise into the cloud? If you're a startup going to the clouds really easy, you just provision some servers, you're up and running. If you want to really do the hybrid cloud or multi-clouds really complicated, Meraki's been doing really, really well, what is the big takeaway? I mean, why should people care about Meraki's success and what does it mean to them? So I think it's important to understand why has Meraki been leading the way? We started out cloud-based and that's what was important and that's what's been leading for the past couple of years and we look forward to pushing ourselves above and beyond that. So we also work with partners such as WWT that also embrace that same philosophy and technology and you can see that based on the things that WWT has done up to this day. I mean, Joe, if you want. What's the most you guys done with Meraki? Yeah, I mean, what we love about Meraki for enterprise is being able to leverage APIs to be able to do things at scale and quickly. So we've done some of the largest Meraki deployments, I would say, to date in North America. You know, hundreds of Meraki networks, hundreds of site locations a night with leveraging some of the APIs that Meraki's built, obviously, and then some platform innovations we've done on top of that. Expand on that, give us some color on that. So what does that mean? Hundreds of sites. I mean, is it just offices? Is it full networks? What's the density of it? Can you just kind of unpack that a little bit? Yeah, so we had a customer that we were deploying retail locations. So 10 to 15 Meraki devices per site and being able to do that at scale, be able to deploy those really, I think our max was about 200 on one night that we cut over leveraging APIs. So yeah, it's... What's the big walk away from Meraki? Obviously the simplicity is at one, but you're seeing IoT becoming a big thing where you don't want to have to hire someone to go out and actually turn stuff on. These networks need to be self-provision, self-managed, self-healing. That seems to be the trend that everyone wants, right? So that's obviously just getting stuff up and running. But then actually having it operate and connect into the network seems to be the hard part. Is that where the magic is? Courtney, where's the secret sauce? I mean, where's in all of this? So the beauty about Meraki is that you can use that infrastructure to build a solution, and that's the goal. I mean, we've been doing networking for years and there's no doubt about where the future holds. We want you to know that there's different solutions that you can build on top of your Meraki infrastructure, whether you're focusing on provisioning or you're looking at doing any kind of scanning APIs. Those are things that are leading the future. We're also trying to help you find innovative ways to bring other business units into the IT business. So for instance, marketing is huge. They have huge budgets. They want to invest in their IT infrastructure. And if we're able to give value by showing them what they can extract from the network, that's where the APIs are key to tie in. So integration's really critical. Absolutely. Is that you said APIs is where you see the critical advantage for you guys? How are you guys doing the API? Are you just slinging your APIs with Meraki's? Are you connecting them? You're writing code integration? Where's the touch point? Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that the power that Worldwide brings to the table, especially after acquiring Asynchrony Labs three years ago now, which is a software development arm of Worldwide now, is being able to take those conversations, those integration conversations, and say what's the business outcome you're trying to achieve? So if a customer, a marketing or a line of business person says these are the things we're trying to accomplish, a lot of those are going to be enabled by infrastructure and enabled at scale for enterprise customers really only via APIs. But there's more to that conversation too. I mean, it might be what's the marketing campaign we want to do or what digital innovation are we going to try to do that's going to make us competitive in this space where we can take our business innovation practice and our practice around mobile and web development and tie it into the business outcome we're creating for a customer, leveraging the Meraki infrastructure, leveraging the capabilities that Meraki brings to the table, leveraging APIs around who's in your store, traffic analytics and things like that and pulling those all into a solution, whether it's a consumer facing solution or a backend solution for sales associates that helps give them insight about what's happening. It's kind of knowing the business outcome you're trying to achieve and putting the right pieces in place. Joe, I wonder if you can expand a little bit on the transformation that WWT is going through and your customers. We're here in the debit zone. I've known WWT for years and moving up the stack and APIs and things like that isn't the traditional position that I think at WWT. Long time Cisco partner done lots of great solutions over the year, but it was at the infrastructure level, which not to say that's a bad thing. So talk a little bit about more that those transformations for you and your customers and partnering with Cisco even further. Yeah, I think, like I said, we got acquired, I'm part of Asynchrony Labs actually originally and we got acquired by Worldwide three years ago. I think it was a really smart move because Jim Cavanaugh saw the spaces moving toward software to find everything basically and being able to have that capability built in. I think it's really changed the way we go to market. We can have conversations now, conversations that do include infrastructure, like infrastructure is still core to our business, but conversations that can start at the marketing or line of business side or the digital transformation space or really whatever business outcome that a customer is hoping to achieve, we now have the ability to have that conversation at any level. Everything from our skills and expertise traditionally at Worldwide and deploying infrastructure at Worldwide scale and supply chain management, supply chain management and just top notch integration skills and solution delivery. And now with Asynchrony being able to apply our best in class business innovation, digital transformation, mobile development, web development skills into that mix, we can really provide fully customized solutions delivered to a customer. Take us through what that means for the customer and use it as a way to compare five years ago. Let's just go back in time, pretend it was five, roll back five years, no Maraki. What's the road look like? And then what's the road look like with Maraki? If you had to do this five years ago, what would you have to do? Get a project team, have an assessment of the customer? I mean, much different world. Take us through what, in your mind's eye, what that road would look like. So as someone from Asynchrony on the software side, I can tell you what it looked like five years ago before we were acquired by Worldwide. When we had conversations with some of our big retail customers, for example, we would only be able to go so far in the conversation. We could do the app development. We could take a mobile app and bring it up to par, make sure it integrated well with backend systems. But when it came to what does it take to actually deploy a new customer experience at scale across 4,000 retail locations, we would have to have partners. And now with Worldwide, we can have that conversation. We can integrate through our ATC lab space, our Advanced Technology Center labs. We can integrate a retail location in our lab six months before we deploy it in the real world and have it be exactly the same hardware and software that we're going to deploy in the real world. So we can now have conversations where we're working with infrastructure ahead of the game to make sure that there's a seamless rollout rather than there being sort of a line of business versus IT conversation where line of business says, hey, we have this new digital innovation, but it's not working because the network isn't solid. It's a two step process in the old way, which long creates more risk, more a lot of moving parts. Yeah, and now we have someone seamlessly connecting those pieces across the spectrum. And you do it up front, and then you just deploy. And we know what's a good network strategy to make this scale at enterprise scale, and then what's a good digital strategy to say how are we going to integrate with that? What beacon technology are we going to use? What network APIs are we going to connect to? What analytics do we want to achieve through this transformation to measure its success and have that built in to the infrastructure from the beginning, so. Talk about the management side. Obviously, intelligent dashboarding is big, machine learning, they have a lot of that in their products, only going to get better and talking to the lead executives of the group. For you on the front lines with customers, you want to have that awareness of what's happening, the instrumentation. What is, how's that working for you? Good? Is it working out? What's your view on that? Yeah, I'd say that it's been really good working with Meraki because of the APIs, but we've also opened up some new offerings around Meraki lately from a managed service perspective. We now have a, I would say a digital transformation engine called Branch of the Future, which is designed around not just managing Meraki at scale, but it does have that component, but really the whole ecosystem of what does it take to do a digital innovation leveraging Meraki at enterprise scale, and it includes, like I mentioned, our Advanced Technology Center labs, it includes a managed service, it includes branch service capabilities to be able to roll out hundreds of sites a night, at scale, but it also includes platform innovations like Thelios, which is what I'm the product manager for, which is really a platform for digital innovation that leverages Meraki APIs, leverages other technologies that are going to be in a space like a retail space, pulls those together to provide an analytics capability to provide provisioning, to provide other commonly needed capabilities, and really just gives customers a way that they can engage with worldwide and in a continuous manner, that's going to give them an engine for innovation where they can make a network upgrade, for example, rather than taking four years and rolling something out slowly that they're trying to do a transformation and not getting the benefits of that technology for four years, leveraging Branch of the Future, we can do that same thing in four months, and that big investment they've made in infrastructure, they can actually get an ROI on that immediately, but it doesn't stop there, because then we can say, all right, what's working, what's not, based on the analytics we're taking, what's the next step, and build in that continual evolving of the offering for the customer? Four years to four months. Courtney, what are you hearing from customers? How are their needs evolving? What's driving them from the business and from some of the new technologies? Well, so they're looking at what's next, what's the trends, what are customers wanting, what exactly are their guest experience that they're wanting to have? So it varies based on the vertical. They want more intelligence, they want more out of their infrastructure, and that's where I feel like we've definitely filled that void, and creating this partnership with WWT has been amazing to see what customers are taking from it. They see the advantages of more than just a regular infrastructure running. They're getting to the point of truly embracing intelligent networking. On the future of you guys with Maraki, you know, you're doing deployments overnight, massive numbers, we hear anecdotes from Todd Knight and Gale that customers are giving hugs to each other. I mean, things that have never happened before are happening. And this is the cloud scale, and the CEO of Cisco's and Kino talking about a scale is really the new normal. How are you guys, what are some of the projects you're working on that you could share that give an indicator of some of the cool things and relevant things that are going on? What are some of the projects you're working on right now? Yeah, I'm not allowed to talk about specific customer names, but we can, some of the things that we're building are enhanced customer-centric views of network health, for example. So building systems that show network health from the perspective of the business in simple ways that customers can understand, not just at the IT level, but at the CEO level or at the marketing level. So a lot of customization, leveraging APIs and leveraging platform technology. Yeah, for the customers that are out there that might be assistive customers or new to Meraki. What's your takeaway? What would you say to them and they say, you know, what is this Meraki thing? What does it mean to me? What would your advice be to your peers or someone watching? What would you say to them? You kind of sum it up into a bumper sticker. Yeah, I would say that you need to have those APIs for scale. You need to have a cloud-managed platform that can really scale to the solution you're trying to offer, especially if you're an enterprise customer. And you need to have a partner that understands how to manage to the business outcome you're trying to achieve, not just manage at the technology level. You really need a conversation. You need to be able to create a conversation between your business stakeholders and your IT stakeholders and your marketing and other stakeholders, infrastructure stakeholders, and say, what are we trying to achieve as a business? And I think worldwide is uniquely positioned to be able to help have those conversations with those customers through our business innovation practice, through our chief digital advisors and chief technical advisors practice, and just our deep and rich experience with being able to do this at scale. So, yeah. Cordy, same question to you. Say someone bumps into you, a friend sees you on the street. Hey, Cordy, what's this Maraki thing about? What would you say to them? I would tell them it's the way of the future. I had to shift even my mindset when I joined the team and it was a great shift. I finally was able to have that work-life balance that we all dream of as network engineers. So, that's what I would say to someone. They're able to gather so much intelligence from it. Yeah, it's really awesome. And this is CloudScale. Do it right, it's magic. More time on your hands to have more fun and do other things. Secure live coverage here in Orlando, Florida, Francisco, Live 2018. We'll be back with more. Stay with us. Day one is continuing of three days of wall-to-wall live coverage. We'll be right back. Stay with us. Thanks for watching.