 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here. Exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. We're in Barcelona, Spain for theCUBE. Day one wrap of our two days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman, and we're going to break down. Day one, Stu. You know, I can go for a couple more hours. Who else we got? Let's do, we'll go live for a marathon session. No, let's wrap it up. We've got a full day tomorrow. Got some great guests here at the keynote. Cisco laying out their vision, and the story is kind of coming together, and I think Cisco has clarity. So my takeaway, I learned a lot. I learned that Cisco is not just talking, they're walking, but they've got a lot of work to do. And I think that the signs of great progress with Cisco, Stu, one is Rowan put out a great keynote that looks forward, not back. They didn't lean on their base and saying, we're going to milk this cow until it's dead, meaning the networking engineers in the position. They're looking forward and putting a vision out there that says, here's how the network will transform applications, and they had a lot of use cases from IoT to multi-cloud and more. And two, they're cracking the code on IoT because they bought Jasper, which is backhaul essentially using cellular to the classic OT market, which is a classic end-to-end. To me, that was a revelation to me, and I think that might be the unique creative thinking that could bring IoT into IT and transform the highly unsecure IoT Wi-Fi IP market because anyone can throw a smart light bulb or whatever device, full processing, multi-threading capabilities, and that can be hijacked and taken over and spewing malware, ransomware, and everything else in between. Yeah, John, if anything, what I critique a little bit is he gives the vision of 2050. Go to a show like Amazon, they're like, hey builders, here's what we have for you today that's really cool. And I think we heard a lot from Cisco today of cool things they have. Big acquisitions, like APTI, we've talked a lot about. There was in the IoT discussion today, talked about, it was a $1.4 billion acquisition they made in that space. Here in the DevNet zone, they're not talking about the future, they're talking about what they're building today. Well, Stu, Stu, do you know how I feel about this? I kind of roll my eyes when I get that kind of futuristic with no meat on the bone. If you're going to have sizzle, you better have some steak on the grill. So that's the critique for me I'm looking and squinting through the hype and use cases, oh, the future's going to be upon us to reality. What have they got now? And that's the progress that I see and the signals that are showing to me are DevNet, active transformation of classic network engineer, operator, to programmer. One, two, Susie, we pointed out a new concept that we love called NetDevOps, which is programming the network for microservices and these new services with Kubernetes as the linchpin. Heard a little bit about Google, so there's some alignment with Google. And of course, Cisco's got billion dollar partners in the ecosystem. So there's certainly great fertilizer, if you will, for this growth. So they've got a lot of things coming together and I think the challenge for Cisco and the strategic imperative that I see for the management team is show progress now. Now you get the vision, that's the sizzle, show the stake, that's what's happening now. If they can bring that Amazon like Mojo, I would think they hit a home run. Yeah, sure. John, you know, we've got the learning labs behind you in DevNet area here. It's the first time in two whole days, I haven't seen it packed. And that's just because 15 minutes ago, the World of Solutions reception opened. So they've got snacks, they've got beer and wine, the music's going over there. So everybody's kind of moved over there, but this area's been hopping. A day before the rest of the show really started before the keynotes. So absolutely, I loved how Susie talked about the four-year transformation internally. We'd watched some of the people inside Cisco beating the drum talking about making change. Cisco's made investment in open source. They've tried to move the needle some, but this developer wave, absolutely they need to be a part of it. I think back to John Chambers talking about all the adjacencies, some of the failed acquisitions, flip acquisition, some of the set top box type stuff. IoT, as a message they've had, I think you laid it out well. They had a good vision up front, but the market needed to mature something. Now we are ready for this to be real. So partner ecosystem, absolutely. Cisco is still a behemoth in the space and they've got strong partnerships a lot of way. There's a lot of transitions. There's some things they need to be careful about how they make the moves, but absolutely there's interesting times here. Stu, you and I always love to talk about this because the network is where the bottleneck has always been. You mentioned, and one of the questions of who the guest was, what's going on with software defined networking? Well guess what? The network of services changes that game. With Kubernetes now as a kind of integration layer, it kind of splits the line between app developers and under the hood software engineering all the way down to network engineering. Those are okay personas, but now you have policy programmability at the network level that services can take advantage of and those app developers that are slinging APIs, doing Node.js, they're used to IOs, they're used to programming these functions. This kind of feels a little bit like serverless is coming to the table. Haven't heard that word here, but kind of getting that vibe. Yeah, no, absolutely. Haven't heard serverless. We have talked about containers some. Obviously talked about Kubernetes and everything we want, but the multi-cloud is still a little bit early for where Cisco plays. They're really at that M&O piece of it where Cisco has had a number of plays over the years and they make an acquisition. We'll see how it is. My friends in the networking space, the line is the single pane of Glass, John, is spelled P-A-I-N. So I'm glad I didn't hear that term from Cisco. I heard it once, only. Oh, okay. In the keynote. In general, they understand some of the challenges. They touch a lot of the pieces and they're not being overly dogmatic. They're not bashing the public cloud. Yes, they have a lot more revenue in the data centers, in the service providers, but they're not coming out here as a cloud denier. It's a great point. Well, for a couple of things. One, you know how you feel about multi-cloud. I think multi-cloud's BS right now. I think it's one of those moonshots down the road. And I don't think anything's going to happen in multi-cloud for a while. Your private cloud report on wikibomb.com kind of validates that. But the thing about the pane of Glass is that Cisco actually has a lot of that on the management side. What needs to happen is that pane of Glass management has to move up the stacks, too. And this is where I think the test will be for them. So that's going to be key. The thing that I did not hear that I'm surprised about is I didn't hear anything about data-driven, anything. There's a lot of stuff being talked about, programmable networking. It kind of implies data. We even heard the IoT general manager talk about, you know, IoT feeds, AI. I think AI is fed by data. Certainly IoT supports data. But I didn't hear about how their data is driving either policy, automation. Not enough of that. I think that's a weak area. I would say they got to do some work on it. And John, some of that I think is just terminology because if you look inside the intent-based networking pieces that Cisco talked about, David Geckler this morning in the keynote, he said it's about learning and security. Learning, it's all about data. How do we train those models? You know, they didn't throw out the kind of AI and ML buzzwords out there, but underneath, that's what's happening. It is about data. Just networking people don't talk about data nearly as much as, you know, the compute or the storage people. You're right, serverless. You know, how will that impact the network? Because underneath, infrastructure matters. Things going to have to move around a lot more. I would have expected to hear some mention of it. Well, you made a good point. I agree with you. I love this intent-based networking. It really changes the conversation because if you say, what is that? What is intent in context? Huge conversation point, huge area to explore. This truly will make an adaptive network a flexible network. It'll make it programmable. That's what people want. App developers need to have the services on the network side and they need the automation. Really, really key point. Okay, any other learnings for you, Stu? Really, John, it's going through that shift in model as we talked about in the intro. Cisco heavily moving towards that software model. Like Rios who they brought in, heavy software background. You've got that balance of Cisco has strong history. They are trusted, network provider. Trust and risk are absolutely the number one things that customers hear about. Security is something they need to bang on but they need to undergo those transformations. People like Susie, like Rios, coming in helping to drive what's happening there and it's been nice to see very different from when the last time I came to Cisco, very heavy, just gear and people, plugging and running around, dealing with all those challenges. You think back to customers always, what do they spend, 70 to 80% on keeping the lights on? Most of the activities we talked about here aren't the oh, how do we keep the lights on? It's about growing the business and transforming the business which is the imperative for CIOs today. The other thing I like today was we had storage on IBM and NetApp with a Cisco partner and ecosystem managed executives. Here's the thing that I learned and I'm happy to see this because you're seeing storage going through the haves and have nots. There's a line going on, maybe it's N-V-F-E-O-V-E-S. N-V-M-E-O-V-E-Fabric, yes. N-V-M-E-O-V-E-Fabric is causing a line that's going to define history either on the wrong side of history or the rights. I was seeing storage startups struggling. You're seeing a lot of companies that we knew that when public going out of business, startups cratering, but there's winners. And hearing the Cisco guys with NetApp and IBM, you start to see the storage vendors who continue to make it doing well and they're differentiating. So what Cisco's actually has done masterfully in my opinion is they've balanced the ecosystem with the storage guys so that they can let everyone win. And it's like a race car. Do you want the Lamborghini or the Ferrari or Porsche? I mean, you have different versions of storage. Each one can stand on their own and use Cisco and the better mouse trap wins, the better engine will win for the use cases of the storage guys. So you're seeing kind of like some swim lanes for storage. That's a good sign, Stu, for Cisco. Yeah, absolutely. And that's how Cisco really drove that that wave of converged infrastructure. Heard from lots of the partners at the show today why. CI, even though it's not the sexiest thing anymore because it's over eight years old now, we've been talking about it, billions of dollars. That's what drove UCS. Cisco has a little bit of fear that they missed out on some of the core virtualization. So they're not going to miss the container trend. They're not going to miss microservices. They're all over these pieces, but absolutely they understand the value of ecosystem. They're very smart about how they target that. I agree with you. They've got the container magic going on. DevNet certainly is looking good from a developer standpoint. We will be covering the DevNet create event, which is a non-Sysco ecosystem. It's a new territory that Susie Wee has taken down, which is to get real cloud native developers that aren't necessarily in the ecosystem. So that's going to be a positive. The thing I want to ask you, Stu, to end day one wrap up, because this is kind of coming up as the NVMe over fabric. What's the impact of Cisco? Because we see the impact on the marketplace with that David Floyer would be chiming away if he was here, but I'd like to get your thoughts because you cover it closely. How is that going to help Cisco? Does it hurt Cisco? Does it enable them? Is it a game changer? What's the impact of NVMe over fabric? Yeah, so look, Cisco, remember, not just a networking company, they're a compute supplier with UCS here. They have the M5, they're latest that they had there. Cisco's all over this. They're involved. It's how do I really bring kind of that HPC type of environment we've been talking about in the networking space, you know, RDMA options out there, iWarp and Rocky, and NVMe over fabrics now is going to be able to give me even higher speed, really low latency, getting scuzzy out of the way, which has been something that we've been trying to do for over a decade now in the storage world. So I don't think, you know, we talked to Eric Herzog this morning and I really agree with him. This is evolutionary. This is not something that's catching anyone by surprise. It's not like, you know, we're going from wire to wireless, or, you know, hey, this is now ethernet instead of token ring. It's like, oh. So not a massive shift. It is similar to disk and flash. It's absolutely, it's the next generation and there will be companies that implement it better, but we've all seen it coming. All the big guys are involved with it in it. So, you know, Cisco, it relates to them and their ecosystem and you expect them to, you know, not be a huge shift. So one of the things we did not hear about, maybe it's not a main theme here, it's certainly an undercurrent, it's certainly mainstream in the tech industry, both on the enterprise and emerging tech, certainly on AI and softwares too, is the role of open source software. Not a lot going on here. I look for sessions. I didn't see any birds of a feather or any meetups around open source. I know it's a DevNet show. It's Cisco show. DevNet creates a little more open source with Cloud Foundry. We've interviewed folks like that and others. But if they're going to be talking to Google and we're talking about Kubernetes, you cannot ignore the role of open source in the Cisco ecosystem. Your thoughts miss, not relevant for this show, kind of in the back burner. Maybe Cisco is boiling something up. What's happening with their role and impact with open source? Yeah, so John, we heard that there's got their presentation tomorrow on Istio. They're working with Google on that. I'm not surprised not to see heavy open source in here. It would fit into the cloud messaging. Absolutely Cisco. On that Kubernetes train, we talked about in the containers ecosystem, when Docker announced the networking pieces. Cisco was right up there. Wanted to make sure they're there. So Cisco's doing it. John, they've had middling success to where they've actually been able to roll that into their products. We've covered a lot of it because we're big proponents of it. But the typical customer here, I don't think that they're like, oh, hey, I didn't see this. There's other places where those communities, the builders and contributors in those environments, know where Cisco is. Hey, Cisco got billions of dollars. They got to focus on that, I agree. But open source is important. You know, Stu, we think Kubernetes could possibly unlock the multi-cloud path. We're constantly watching it. I think it's important to them. They have to be there. I mean, they're talking to Kubernetes, they're talking about that line in the stack that creates an app developer, very cohesive app developer ecosystem. And then an under the hood engineering, software engineering mindset. They got to play. I mean, if you're going to play with Google in multi-cloud, Google's all in open source. They want to be on Amazon. They got to be open source. So they got to be there. So we'll see. We'll see how it goes. Okay, day one, wrap up here, Cube, live in Barcelona for exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018. We'll be here all day tomorrow as well. Thanks for watching. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. Thanks for watching.