 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, everyone, live here in Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier, I like those. Dave Vellante, our next guest is Liz Santoni, Senior Vice President General Manager of the IoT Group at Cisco, formerly as part of the engineering team. CUBE alumni, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Great to be here. So you're in the center. Always good to see you guys. So you're in the center, a lot of news. IoT, edge of the network, redefining, networking on stage. We heard that. Talk about your role in the organization of Cisco and the products that you now have and what's going on here. So I run our IoT business group. Similar to what we do with EN, data center, all of that, it has the engineering team, product management team, we build products, solutions that includes hardware, software, silicon, take them out to market. Really, in IoT, it's about, you know, the technology conversation comes second. It's like, what can you deliver in terms of use case and business outcomes that comes first? And it's more about what technology can enable that. So the conversations we have with customers around, how can you really solve my kind of real problems? Everything from, I want to grow my top line. I want to get closer to my customers because the closer I get to my customers, I know them better. So obviously I can turn around and grow my top line. And I want to optimize everything from internal process to external process because it just improves my bottom line at the end of the day. See a lot of news happening here around your team. But first, talk about redefining networking and context to your part because edge of the network has always been, what is, you know, the edge of the network. Now it's extending further. IoT is one of those things that people are looking at from a digitization standpoint, turning on more intelligence with a factory floor or other areas. How is IoT changing and what is it today? So you gave an example of, you know, digitizing something like a factory floor, right? So let's talk about that. So what do customers in the factory floor want to do? They've already automated a number of this factory floors but what they want to do is get more efficient. They want better yield. They want better quality. They want to bring security all the way down to the plant floor because the more and more you connect things, the more you've just expanded your threat surface out, pretty significantly. So they want to bring security down to the plant floor because these are environments that are not brand new. They have brownfield equipment, they have greenfield equipment. They want to be able to have control of what device gets in the network with things like device profiling. They want to be able to do things like create zones so that they can do that with things like network segmentation. So when and if an attack does happen, they can contain the attack as much as possible, right? Now, what you need in terms of a factory floor, automation, security to be able to scale, to have that flexibility, that's no different than what you have in the enterprise already. I mean, we've been working with our IT and enterprise customers for years and you know, it's about automation and security. It's about simplicity. Why not extend that out? The talent that IT has, the capability that has, it really is a connective tissue that you're extending your network from that carpeted space or your clean space into outside of the office or into the non-carpeted space. So it's perfect in terms of saying it's about extending the network into the non-traditional space that probably IT doesn't go into today. Well, right, and it's a new constituency, right? So how are you sort of forging new relationships, new partnerships? What is, describe what that's like with the operations technology? I mean, at Cisco, we have great partnerships with the IT organization, right? I mean, we've got more than 840,000 customers and our sales teams, our product teams do a good job in terms of listening to customers. We're talking more and more to the line of business. We're talking more and more to the operational teams because at the end of the day, I want to be candid. You know, going to a manufacturing floor, I've never run a plant floor, right? There are not very many people in the team who can say I've been a plant manager before. They know their processes. They're concerned about 24-7 operation. Hey, I want to be in compliance with the fire marshal. Physical safety of my workers. We come in with that IP knowledge, that security knowledge that they need. It's a partnership. I mean, people talk about IT and OT convergence. Usually convergence means that somebody's going to lose their job. This is more an IT and OT partnership. And most of these digitization efforts usually come in for the CIO level or a chief digitization officer. We've got good relationships there already. The second part is Cisco's been in this for quite some time. Our teams already have relationships at the plant level, at the grid level, operator level, you know, in the oil and gas area. But we need to build more and more of that because building more and more of that is really understanding what business problems are they looking to solve? Then we can bring the technology to it. Liz, what's that in the enablement? You mentioned partnership. That's a good point. People think, oh, you know, someone wins, someone loses. The partnership is you're enabling, you're bringing new capability into the physical world. You know, from wind farms to whatever. What does the enablement look like? What are some of the things that happen when you guys come into these environments that are being redefined and reimagined or for the first time? Yeah, I would say, you know, I'd use what our customer said this morning. And what he said was, IT has the skills that I need. All right, they have the IP skills, they have the security skills. These are all the things that I need. I want my guys to focus on kind of business processes around things that they know best. And so we're working with IT as part of what we're putting this extended enterprise, extending intent-based networking to the IoT edge means IT already knows our tools, our capabilities. We're now saying we can extend that. Let's go out, figure out what those use cases are together. This is why we're working with not just the IT, we're working with our channel partners as well who can enable these implementations on IoT implementations work well. Part of this is also a constant, you know, learning from each other. We learn from the operational teams is that, hey, you can start a proof of concept really well, but you can't really take it to deployment unless you address things around the complexity, the scale, and the security. That's where we can come in and help. And you can't just throw your switches and routers over the fence and say, okay, here you go. You have to develop specific solutions for this world, right? And can you talk about that a little bit and tell us what you're doing now? Absolutely, so if you look at the networking, industrial networking portfolio that we have, it's built on the same catalyst, ISR, wireless APs, our firewall, but they're more customized for this non-carpeted space, right? You've got to take into consideration that these are not sitting in a controlled environment. So we test them for temperature, for shock, for vibration, but it's also built on the same software. So we're talking about the same software platform. You get the same automation features, you get the same analytics features. It's managed by DNA center. So even though we're customizing the hardware for this environment, the software platform that you get is pretty much the same. So IT can come in and manage both those environments, but IT also needs an understanding of what's the operational team looking to solve for? Liz, I want to ask you about the psychology of the buyer in this market, because OT, they're running stuff that's just turned it on, put in a light bulb, make it work. Well, I got to deploy something. So there are kind of expectations might be different. Can you share what the expectations are for the kind of experience that they want to have with tech? I use a utility as a great example and our customer from Enoji, I think, explained this really well. This is thing that we learn from our customers. I haven't been in a substation. I've been in a data center multiple times, but I haven't been in a substation. So when they're talking about automating substation, we work with customers. We've been doing this over the last 10 years. We've been working with that energy team for the last two years. They taught us really how they secure and manage in these environments. You're not going to find a CCIE in this environment. So when you want to send somebody out to like 60,000 substations and you want to check on, hey, do I still have VPN connectivity? They're not going to be able to troubleshoot it. What we did is based on the customer's ask, put a green light on there or an LED that shines green. All the technician does is look at it and says, it's okay. If not, they call back in terms of troubleshooting it. It was just a simple example of where it's different in terms of how they secure and manage and the talent that they have is different than what's in the IT space. So you've got to make sure that your products also cover what the operational teams need because you're not dealing with the CCIE or the IP experts. So it's the classic product market fit for what they're expecting. Correct. LEDs, can't go wrong with green light. I mean, you know. Everybody goes, that's such an easy thing. It's like, well, it was not that perceptive to us. What's the biggest thing you've learned as you move from Cisco engineering out to the new frontier on the edge here? What are the learnings that you've seen? Obviously, growing market early, it's only going to get larger, more complicated, more automation, more AI, more things. What's your learnings? What have you seen so far that take away? So I'll say, you know, B, I'm still in Cisco engineering. The reason we're in IoT is that a secure and reliable network. That's the foundation of any IoT deployment. You can go out and buy the best sensor, buy the best application, buy the best middleware. But if you don't have that foundation that's secure and reliable, those IoT projects are not going to take off. So it's pretty simple. Everyone's network is the enabler of their business outcome and that's why we're in it. So this is really about extending that network out but at the same time understanding what are we looking to solve for. So in many cases we work with third party partners because some of them know these domains much better than we do but we know the IP, we're the IP and the security experts and we bring that to the table better than anybody else. And over the top DevNet is showing here for the second year that we've covered it here in DevNet zone, that when you have that secure network that's programmable, really cool things can develop on top of it, that's a great opportunity. This is, I'm super excited that we now have an IoT DevNet in as part of our entire Cisco DevNet, half a million developers. Susie, we and team done a fabulous job. There's more and more developers going to be starting to develop at the IoT edge, at the edge of the network. So when you look at that is our platforms today with IOX on top of it, make this a software platform that developers can actually build applications to. It's really about, we're ready, ISVs and developers unleashing those applications at the IoT edge. And with Susie making that available in terms of the tools, the resources, the sandbox that you can get, it's like we expect to see more and more developers building those applications at the edge. We got to talk about your announcements, right? Oh yeah, exciting set of events. What's the hard news? So we launched four things today as part of extending IBM or intent-based networking to the IoT edge. The first one is we've got three new Cisco-validated designs. So think of a validated design as enabling our customers to actually accelerate their deployments. So our engineering teams try to mimic as much as possible a customer's environment. And they do this pre-integration, pre-testing of our products, third-party products, and we actually put them out by industry. So we have three new ones out there for manufacturing, for utilities, and for remote and mobile assets. That's one. The second one is we're launching two new hardware platforms on Next Generation Catalyst Industrial Ethernet Switch. It's got modularity of interfaces, and it's got nine expansion packs. The idea is make it as flexible as possible for a customer's deployment. Because these boxes might sit in an environment, not just for three years, like in a campus. They could sit there for five, for seven, for 10 years. So adding on, giving them that flexibility, they can be a base system and just change the expansion modules. We also launched our Next Generation Industrial Router. It actually is the industry's probably first and only full IPv6-capable industrial router. And it's got, again, flexibility of interfaces. We have LTE, we have fiber, we have copper. You want dual LTE? You can actually slap an expansion pack right on top of it. When 5G comes in, you just take the LTE module out, you put 5G, so it's 5G ready. Expansion's all in there. And it's based on IOSXC, it's managed by DNA Center, and it's edge-enabled. So they run IOX, you can build your applications and load them on. So we can build them, third parties can load them. And the DevNet piece here as well. And the DevNet piece is the third one is where we now have an IoT developer center in the DevNet zone. So with all the tools that are available, it enables developers and ISVs to actually build on top of IOX today. In fact, we actually have more than a couple of three examples that are already doing that. And the fourth thing is, we depend on a large ecosystem of channel partners. So we've launched an IoT specialization training program to enable them to actually help our customers implementation go faster. So those are the four things that we brought together. The key thing for us was designing these for scale, flexibility, and security. It's capabilities available today, is that right? Absolutely. In fact, if you go in, we're shipping in two weeks. And you can see them at the innovation showcase. It's actually very cool. I was going to mention, you brought the ecosystem, I'm glad you brought that. I was going to ask about how that's developing. Can only imagine new sets of names coming out of the industry in terms of building on these IOTs. This is demand for IOT. It's an emerging market in terms of newness with a lot of headroom. So what's the ecosystem look like? Is there a pattern? Is it ISVs, VARs? Does it take the shape of the classic ecosystem? Or is it a new set of characters? Or what's the makeup of the ecosystem? I would say is, in many ways, if you've been in the IOT world for some time, you'll say it's not like there's a whole new set of characters. Yes, you have more cloud players in there. You probably have more SIs in there. But it's been like the distributors are in there, the machine builders, the OT platforms. These are folks who've been doing this for a long time. It's more around how do you partner and where do you monetize? We know where the value we bring in. We rely on, we work very closely with this OT partners, machine builders, SIs, the cloud partners to go to market and deliver this. You're right, the market's going to evolve because the whole new conversation is around data. What do I collect? What do I compute at the edge? Where do I route it to? Should I take it to my on-premises data center? Should I take it to the cloud? Who gets control over the data? How do I make sure that I have control over the data as a customer and I have control over who gets to see it? So I think this will be a evolving conversation. This is something we're enabling with one of our kinetic platforms, which are not launched, it's already launched in terms of enabling customers to have control over the data and manage their data as well. And bring all the portfolio of Cisco security, analytics, management to the table. That puts anything in the world that has power and connectivity to be a device to connect into a system. This is the, I mean, it's how obvious it's going to be. It's going to be huge. I'm great, it's great that you think it's obvious. That's exactly what we're trying to tell our customers. How to do it. This is about extending this out. Yeah, how do we do it? It's the playbook, right? So each business has its own unique. There's no general purpose IOT, is there? It's pretty much on a customer customer. Well, thanks for coming on, Liz. Appreciate it. I want to ask you one final question. You know, I was really impressed with Karen, had a great session, Karen walked out of session yesterday, impacted with women. We interviewed you at Grace Hopper in 2015. Cisco's doing amazing work. You take a minute to talk about some of the things that Cisco's doing around women in computing, women in STEM, just great momentum, great success story and great leadership. I would say look at our leadership at Chuck's level. And I think that's a great example in terms of, he brings people on depending on what they can, what they bring to the table, right? They just happen to be a lot of women out there. And the reality is, I work for a company that believes in inclusion, whether it's gender, race, different experiences, different thoughts, different perspective because that's where truly in terms of you can bring in the culture that drives that innovation. I've been sponsoring our Women in Science and Engineering for I can't remember the last four or five years. It's a community that continues to grow. And the reality is we don't sit in there and talk about woe is me and all the things that are happening. What we talk about is, hey, what are the cool new technologies that are out there? How do I get my hands on them? And yeah, we talk about some things where women are a little reticent and shy to do. So we learn from other people's experiences. Many times the guys are very interested. So we sit down there and talk and I said, trust me, it's not like a whining and moaning section. It's more in terms of where we learn from each other. He is talking and sharing ideas and innovation and building things. And we've got, we look around and we've got a great set of women leaders throughout the company at every single level, at every function. It's great to be there. We continue to sponsor Grace Hopper. We have some of the biggest presence at Grace Hopper. We do so many other things like connected women within the company. It's just a, I would say fabulous place to be. You guys do a lot of great things for society, great company, great leadership. Thank you for doing all that. It's phenomenal. We love covering it too. We'll be at Cloud now, today in Silicon Valley. Women in Data Science at Stanford and among other great events. Definitely a passion of ours. We'll be one of our orders. Awesome, that's great to hear. Thanks for coming on. This is theCUBE live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live 2018. We'll be back with more after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Be right back.