 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to San Diego, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Day one of our wall-to-wall coverage. Three days of Cisco Live. We're here in the DevNet zone. A lot of action going around us. CCIE's learning how to become programmers, Stu. Gordon Thompson is here as the vice president of worldwide sales for enterprise networking. Good to see you again, Gordon. Michael Beasley, who's the CTO for Cisco's service provider business. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having us. So Gordon, we were in Barcelona in February. We talked a lot about some of the big trends here. We're going to focus today on 5G and Wi-Fi 6. Since Barcelona, you've been probably talking to a lot of customers. What are you hearing from them? What are the big trends in the marketplace? Well, I think it's interesting, right? Because the first thing we talk about is this massive bandwidth improvement. And everyone says, oh, so what? I mean, that's not interesting, you know? But bandwidth doesn't change the game totally. But I take everyone back to 4G, right? When we moved from 3G to 4G, and when we moved from 3G to 4G, there was a social transformation around bandwidth. And that was the mobile device, right? The mobile device came along where we could do everything on that mobile device. And that was a real social transformation. The interesting thing was that Wi-Fi wasn't really linked to that social transformation. You know, I would go and speak to customers back in the day who would say, bring your own device, not over my dead body. We're never bringing, you know, bring your own device into the environment. And what happened over time was, you know, organizations gradually recognize the importance of bring your own device and 4G and therefore high-speed Wi-Fi. What we see this time around is 5G comes along with this massive bandwidth improvement. But at the same time, organizations are realizing the importance of Wi-Fi 6, similar speeds. And actually what I think we're going to see this time around is the business transformation leading the social transformation. Last time it was the public driving the change into the enterprise. This time I think we're going to see the enterprise drive the change much faster than we saw. It's interesting, because obviously the killer app there that coincided with the social change were with Facebook and Twitter and really a re-emergence of LinkedIn, you know, as a key tool for business people. But it was really the Twitters and Facebooks that sort of drove that. So what's the killer app this time around? Well, you know, I think it's difficult to say, here's the killer app just now, because when 4G came out, we didn't know what the killer app was. So I think it's hard for me to say, here's the killer app. But what I would say is, you know, you start to see things like virtual reality, augmented reality, becoming a reality. And businesses are all starting to now think about how can we use these technologies to get closer to our customers, to improve the productivity of our employees, you know, and how can we reduce cost and you know, and these sorts of things, ultimately, businesses will be very innovative around this. You know, and there'll be multiple different killer apps come along. For us to put our hands on our hearts today and say, this is the killer app, you know, I think that's stuff. You'd be starting a company if you knew. Yeah. So Michael, share with us what we need to know about 5G other than, okay, it's faster. But from an architect standpoint, what do we need to know? What's different? And how's that going to affect the adoption? Yeah, it's interesting. Obviously there's the speed gains, but along with that, there's the densification of the RAM that goes with 5G. And for some customers, for some service providers, the opportunity to virtualize that RAM and to replace traditional integrated baseband units with virtualized infrastructure on which you can run the infrastructure workloads that are needed in the Radio Access Network to be able to run that on compute rather than wall-garden integrated systems which opens up the opportunity to just distribute compute and storage throughout that network infrastructure, which obviously is used for infrastructure, used for the RAM, and used for the distribution of the mobile core. In particular, as we all embrace, and certainly Cisco's embracing from an architecture point of view, the separation of the control plane and the user plane for that mobile packet core. But once you have that infrastructure, once you have that distributed compute, that is much, much closer to the end user, both consumer, but more importantly, the enterprise end user than it's ever been before. That opens up all kinds of opportunities for subsequent workloads to land on that infrastructure. Obviously, caching is the most obvious one. As we all consume more and more videos, certainly we look at the analyst expectations for video and video growth. By 2022, we expect about 81, 82% of all traffic on the network to actually be video traffic. So being able to put video caches at the edge is very important, both from a quality of experience point of view and a pure cost point of view. And then, you've got the opportunity for the placement of all kinds of third-party applications onto that edge compute infrastructure. Without 5G, that edge compute infrastructure probably doesn't come about, which marries up with the trends that we see in enterprise, which is the continuing expansion into the cloud, continued growth of SaaS services, as well as their own private data centers and private cloud, which opens up that edge infrastructure to all of those application vendors that are serving enterprise to build a position workloads at the edge of that network that can take advantage of the low latency and the enhanced bandwidth at those locations in the network. So Stu, pivoting off of what Gordon said, mobile plus 4G and then the social transformation, it sounds like it's, in this case, it's edge, 5G and a business transformation. Dave, what actually the word that I kept hearing jump out at me when Michael was going through that is enterprise, because when I think about the 4G rollout, was Cisco involved? Sure, was Cisco the first one you think of of mobile, social and everything like that? Well, there's a place that Cisco played, but enterprise, enterprise, enterprise? Well, Cisco's got a very strong position in that environment. So is that how we should be thinking of it? And the other thing that Gordon talked about, that inside out, that 5G plus Wi-Fi 6, that pieces together seems like a perfect place for Cisco to add its place to the market. Well, certainly we're very excited about the opportunities with regard to the enterprise space in general and how we can enable, we can partner with our service provider customers to better serve and to better integrate with that enterprise environment, bringing together these two very powerful and innovative technologies, bringing together Wi-Fi 6 and 5G. And certainly we're not the only ones that would observe that. There was a study recently, a few months ago, a study done of the CEOs of mobile network operators and according to that study, 69% of those operators felt that their main monetization and their main way to drive revenue and profit off of 5G was actually oriented towards the enterprise. I'm very excited about number one, so obviously we're known for being a Wi-Fi 6 player, but we're also working very closely with the 5G players in the marketplace to make sure there's seamless handoff between 5G and Wi-Fi 6. So the minute you check into the hotel when you come to San Diego, what's the first thing you do? You put in your name and your room number. Those days are gone, right? There's a seamless handover now from the 5G network to the Wi-Fi network to say this is exactly who you are. We know who you are and we'll on board you seamlessly. And we're working very closely with all of the handset providers to make sure that we integrate neatly there as well. So as we said at the start, I think it'll start this time around with the enterprise transformation. It'll lead the way. The last time around the enterprises were dragged kicking and screaming into this world. They're not getting dragged kicking and screaming into this world this time. They're ready. Where does automation fit into this whole equation? What are your customers telling you? Certainly it's a key area of focus and it's key area of innovation for us. I mean, I would say that when we talk about a 5G network we do have a tendency to over-abstract that. That is a complicated set of technologies of which Cisco is the market leader in many. Obviously we don't do the macro-cell radios. That is not part of our portfolio but we do all of the SDN transport both in terms of equipment, optical modules, the optics themselves, we do all of that. We're leading the industry with regard to the mobile packet core, all of our routing assets and the full automation suite that you need to be able to deploy and manage a network that is in order of magnitude more dense than we've ever seen before. A network that has more equipment deployed further out than we've ever had before. In an environment where obviously our SPs, the service providers and the global kind of comment, they must find ways to make more money and to save money and the automation suite that we bring forward facilitates being able to manage and operate these very, very large networks in a very cost-effective way to the point that the operational cost and the total cost of ownership is significantly reduced but that automation also brings the agility to that network to the point that the service provider's mobile network can more quickly address and more quickly activate services that those enterprise customers in particular need. I mean an enterprise would not want to wait six months for service activation. More likely they want it activated in six minutes and the key to that is having a full suite of closed loop automation tools that enable that service creation. All right guys, sorry we got to leave it there. We're in the speed zone at the DevNet zone and the planes are backing up. So thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. We appreciate it. Thank you for having us. All right everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE live from Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego. Right back.