 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 theCUBE's coverage of day one of Cisco Live from sunny San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Stu Miniman and Stu and I are pleased to welcome a couple of guests from the Cisco platform and solutions group. We've got Barbara Halfley, Senior Director of Business Development. Barbara, great to have you. Nice to be here. And Matt Ferguson, Director of Product Development. Matt, welcome. Thank you, nice to be here. So we appreciate you guys being here right at the start of happy hour here in San Diego. Thank you so much. Well, we're drinking water. Right, wink, wink, just kidding. So Barbara, so here we are at the, this is the 30th year of Cisco's partner and customer event. A lot happens in 30 years, a lot of change. Here we are, customers in every industry living in this multi-cloud hybrid world for many reasons. What are some of the things from the business perspective that you're hearing from customers? What are they looking to Cisco to do to help them traverse this new multi-cloud world successfully? Yeah, well, one of the things that we hear customers tell us often is how do I manage this landscape? Many people think of the cloud as just, oh, I've got a public cloud or oh, I'm going to have my cloud on-prem. But really with the explosion of devices and IoT, people want to know how do I take that data from the edge? From the edge, what do I do with that data? Do I put it up in a public cloud immediately? Do I bring it back to do some kind of analysis on that data? Does it go to a colo? Does it come to the branch? Does it go to the headquarters? And that landscape's very complex. So you look across that landscape and as customers have either proactively adopted the public cloud or had to adopt multiple clouds because of acquisitions they've made, this landscape just gets incredibly complex very, very quickly. So when people come to Cisco, they're basically looking for a couple of things. Number one, security, because putting a security wrapper around all of that, it becomes paramount. People lose their jobs if their data isn't protected. So they want help with their security. They also want to know what's the best cost mix. Right? How do I have the right options available to me? But the other thing they really want is speed of innovation. I mean we hear this over and over and over. I talked to a bank the other day, 100 year old bank, right? You'd think 100 year old bank speed of innovation may not be top of their priority, but absolutely I walked in and they held up the phone and they said our competitors are delivering capabilities faster for the mobile user and every time our competitor releases a new application or a new feature, I lose market share. So it isn't about cost savings anymore, it's about speed of innovation even for 100 year old bank. So when they come to Cisco they want to know can you help secure this landscape? Can you give me speed of innovation? And then of course every cloud starts at the networking layer as well, right? So what innovations is Cisco doing on the networking side? So these are some of the things that customers come to Cisco and they ask us what can you do for us and the help that they want? It comes back to innovation every time. Barbara actually, I've talked to some of those 100 year old companies, they need it more than ever because that five year old bank doesn't have all the legacy and they're already moving as fast. But it's an interesting point, Matt, we've been tracking Kubernetes since the early days. This year it finally feels like it's gotten to a certain maturity level, such that I've talked to a number of customers talking about how that is a lever for their digital transformation, how they're modernizing their application portfolio and not just making of the sausage of how this container orchestration layer is going to do something that most people won't understand. It's that connection with the business, kind of building up what Barbara says there. Bring us inside a little bit more the Kubernetes piece of that. Yeah, it's absolutely been tremendous to see the CNCF and Coomcon just take off on the number of people that are attending. I think Kubernetes as a technology is really starting to hit its stride in the mainstream. It's a combination I think of a number of factors. You have the developer community that's starting to really sort of embrace containers as they sort of refactor their applications. So you have that going on. And then you have the IT ops persona, the people that actually have to manage and deploy the Kubernetes clusters that are starting to dive in and go, we can take this on, we know what it means to actually manage a Kubernetes cluster. The thing that what we're bringing, I think, at Cisco is a curated stack, the opinionated stack. The ability to manage those clusters, the ability to actually deploy those clusters whether it's on-prem in the private cloud or leveraging the APIs that AWS or Google or Azure would publicly provide so that you can manage those clusters in the actual public space as well. So you have a combination of factors that are starting to come together. They really sort of said, this is the opportunity and we're starting to see it happen right now. How would containerization, looking at that example that Barbara gave of the 100-year-old bank needing to transform quickly otherwise? There's so much competition. Matt, from your perspective, what are some of the biggest advantages that a legacy organization like 100-year-old bank is going to get by adopting containers? Yeah, so containers is one thing. So the speed of innovation where they actually have to take their applications, let's for example, as a developer, you have taken your monolithic applications, refactored them into microservices. Now you have one piece of code turning into multiple different pieces of code in containers. Now what you have to do is you have to manage those containers and that's where Kubernetes comes in, to be able to orchestrate those containers. And Google has really sort of offered this technology to the community and that's where I think you have the history of Google's operational sort of expertise, the open source ability to take Kubernetes and then Cisco to sort of wrap around the life cycle management of those containers so that you can not think about the node operating system, the Docker runtime, all the pieces that make up that stack and let the developers just focus on their code. And that's really what we're trying to do is enable the developers to focus on their code and not have an entire team of folks managing the cluster itself. All right, so Barbara, it's an open source community. There's a lot of partners involved so what leads customers to turn to Cisco for these type of solutions? What differentiates them? Well, when you look at a company trying to do it on their own, I'm going to go do IT as a service. I'm going to offer containers as a service, right? To do it on their own can take a year or more. I talked to an entertainment company the other day and they had been working on trying to just define the requirements to do a container platform for a year. So if they can come to a company like Cisco and they can buy the container platform we have as a SaaS offering, have it up and running in a matter of hours, which we have precedence of it running up in a couple of hours and then delivering containers as a service to their constituents, it makes the IT team a hero, right? When you also look at how much it takes to curate that and then maintain it over time, the ability for us to actually consume the changes from the open source community, curate that and release it is very fast. So from an IT perspective, an IT administrator's perspective, you're able to take that, offer it to the community, allow them to do development wherever they want to develop whether it's in the public cloud, whether it's on-prem but maintain that control within the IT community, then you've got something, right? And I mean, Matt could talk about that too, but and he'll agree, when we go to all the customers, what our container platform does, how it leverages Kubernetes, how fast we give the updates out to our customers and at the price point, the ROI we're talking about a month, two months, it's a pretty phenomenal opportunity for IT administrators to get something up and running and offer it to their community very, very quickly. Yeah, no, you bring up some great points there. I remember a couple of years ago when I talked to most customers, it's like, well, what's your stack? Well, I pull these 35 different tools and I build all this stuff and I'm like, and I'm sorry, don't you remember when we went to cloud it's about getting rid of that undifferentiated heavy lifting. Exactly. Why is this mission critical for your business to build and maintain this stack? And of course, the answer is for most customers out there, I want to consume it in platforms and from vendors that I trust so that I can focus on what's important to my business and drive those business drivers. So it was a maturity thing for some of those early customers. So that, are we there? I mean, because Cisco, you've got your Cisco container platform, you partner with the AWS's and Google's the world. Are we getting to that point where customers shouldn't even think about that there's that Kubernetes and service meshes and all that stuff in the middle? Yeah, the number one goal is simplicity and what I would say with the container platform is that we are leveraging the speed of innovation that's occurring at the public cloud. So we're not taking a curated stack from Cisco and putting it on the public cloud. We're leveraging the speed of innovation that the public cloud provides. But at the same time, we're also taking that cluster and we're putting it on-prem into a private cloud. And I say right now, at the point you're making is spot on, you know, you don't necessarily in an IT shop with developers managing that entire stack from top to bottom. You know, why would you want to do that? And the recent quote that I heard recently was you either purchase or buy the product or you are the product. And I think that's a fascinating way to look at it because, you know, you could do that. You could curate it. You could absolutely from top to bottom curate the entire stack. But what typically happens, and we're seeing from customers is, well, organizations move on. They might not necessarily know what was built. They might be code that goes, gets older and expires or, you know, gets out of date. And so now you get stuck in an environment where you're not terrified, but there's a nervousness, trepidation of going, I don't know, let's not break it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And that's a lot of times what happens in these stacks. So I think we're absolutely with the CCP and the public cloud, we're starting to actually get to that. So, Barbara, last question for you, talking about the speed of innovation and when you were describing the massively fast ROI that customers can get by working with you guys from a container solution perspective, it's a no-brainer. As we look at some of the things that we know are coming, the wave of connectivity changes, 5G, Wi-Fi 6, what excites you about how Cisco's story from a container platform perspective is going to change as you start building, and I should say, continue building technologies for these networks that are primarily wireless and incredibly fast? I think what's exciting for me is the way we've approached the architecture, the way we're looking at certainly being more open, everything we do, building it with open APIs and looking across that, the Cisco stack, knowing that at this moment in time, if you would have asked us five years ago, where are you in cloud, right? If you would have asked us 10 years ago, what are you going to do in cloud? But at this moment in time to look at how we differentiate ourselves. Like I mentioned, every cloud starts at the network, you've got to secure the entire infrastructure, you've got to have connectivity between the clouds, hence the CCP, the container platform, right? You have to have cloud management, you have to have cloud analytics. We bring all of that together. So if a company has made investments in Cisco in the past, those investments are going to come forward in this new multi-cloud, multi-domain landscape, and they can leverage those investments while they continue to invest with Cisco in innovations. And that's what really excites me. I think also just the world of AI and ML and big data and how what excites me is that developers can develop anywhere. They can use all the great tools that are available. And I love the idea that the control is back in the hands of the IT administrator from a compliance standpoint, from a governance standpoint. We're bringing that control back into the developer's hands while giving the speed of innovation and the ability to develop anywhere back to the line of business and the developer. So that combination is just really exciting at this moment in time. And here we are in the DevNet zone. This is a massive community of nearly 600,000 strong DevNet. So can you imagine all the innovation going on in this room behind us on day one? Well, we thank you both so much, Barbara and Matt, for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon. Lots of exciting things to come for Cisco. We're just the, as I think Chuck said this morning, we're just getting started. We are just getting started. Absolutely, thank you very much. All right guys, our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE from Cisco Live 2019.