 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting FutureCloud, one event, a world of opportunities. Brought to you by Cisco. Okay, we're here with Thomas Scheiba, who's the Vice President of Product Management, AKA VP of All Things Data Center Networking, SDN Cloud, you name it in that category. Welcome Thomas, good to see you again. Hey, Sam, yes, thanks for having me on. Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, let's get right into observability. When you think about observability, visibility, infrastructure monitoring, problem resolution across the network, how does cloud change thing? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? Yeah, visibility as always is very, very important. And it's quite frankly, it's not just the network team, it's actually the application team too, right? And as you pointed out, the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the data center is where the data is. And I think we said as a couple years back and really what happens, the applications are gonna be deployed in different locations, right? Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on-prem and they're built differently, right? They're built as microservices that they might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need as an operator as well as actually a user a better visibility where are my pieces? And you need to be able to correlate between where the app is and what the underlying network is that is a place in these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge why the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's really the problem statement what we're trying to go after was observability. Okay, and let's double click on that. So a lot of customers tell me that you gotta stare at log files until your eyes bleed and then you gotta bring in guys with lab coats who have PhDs to figure all this stuff out. So you just described it's getting more complex but at the same time you have to simplify things. So how are you doing that? Correct, so what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that is called Thousand Eyes. And so what this does is basically has the name which I think is a fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere and you can have a good correlation on links between if I run from a site to a site from a site to a cloud, from a cloud to a cloud and you basically can measure what is the performance of these links. And so what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of the Thousand Eyes agent, right? Instead of just having an inversion machine of clouds we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices, right? We announced this with the Catalyst 9000 and we're extending this now to our 8000 Catalyst product line for the SD-WAN products as well as to the data center products, the nexus line. And so what you see is, you know, half a saying you have Thousand Eyes, you get a million insights and you get a billion dollar of improvements for how your applications run. And this is really the power of tying together the footprint of what a network is with the visibility of what is going on so you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. I see, so okay, so as the cloud evolves it expands, it connects. You're actually enabling Thousand Eyes to go further not just confined within a single data center location but out to the network across clouds, et cetera. Correct, wherever the network is you're going to have a Thousand Eyes sensor and you can bring this together and you can quite frankly pick. If you want to say, hey, I have my application in public cloud provider A domain one and I have another one domain two I can do monitor that link. I can also monitor after user that has a campus location or branch location I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location all the way to the let's say corporations data center or headquarter or to the cloud and I can have these probes and just have visibility and saying, hey, if there's a performance I know where the issue is and then I obviously can use all the other tools that we have to address those. All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us that it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of ROI and I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and DevOps to this world of hybrid and specifically how is Cisco enabling IT organizations to move to a cloud operating model as that cloud definition expands? Yeah, no, that's another interesting topic beyond the observability. So really what we're seeing and this is going on for I want to say a couple of years it's really this transition from operating infrastructure as a networking team more like a service like what you would expect from a cloud provider, right? It's really around the networking team offering services like a cloud provider does and that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model, right? Well, this is infrastructure running in your own data center where that's linking that infrastructure with whatever runs on the public cloud is operating in like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for a while. So one of the examples that we have removing some of the control software assets that customers today can deploy on-prem to an instance that they can deploy in a cloud provider and just busy instantiate things there and then just run it that way, right? And so the latest example for this is what we have our identity service engine that is now unlimited availability available on AWS and will become available mid this year both on AWS and Azure as a service you can just go to marketplace, you can load it there and now you basically can start running your policy control in a cloud managing your access infrastructure in your data center, in your campus wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see our customers network operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model and basically applying their tools where they need them and when they need them. So what's the scope of, I hope I'm saying it right ice, right? I think it's called ice. What's the scope of that? Like for instance, can it affect my or even you know, address simplify my security approach? Absolutely, that's now coming to what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes, what you can do is really is like there's a lot of people talking about else how do I get to a zero trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic flexible segmentation in my infrastructure? Again, whether this is only campus X as well as in data center and ice helps you there. You can use this as a point to define your policies and then any connect from there, right? In this particular case, if you would instant ice in a cloud as a software load, you now can connect and say, hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center or my campus going to the respective controller whether it's DNA center for campus or whether it's the ACI policy controller. And so yes, what you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage in one place what is my policy and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure. Yes, zero trust, it was pre-pandemic it was kind of a buzzword now it's become a mandate. I wonder if we could talk about, yeah, right? I mean, so I wonder if you could talk about cloud native apps. You got all these developers that are working inside organizations they're maintaining legacy apps they're connecting their data to systems in the cloud they're sharing that data and these developers they're rapidly advancing their skill sets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud native making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? Yeah, so we're going to the top we've established visibility we talked about the operating model how our network operates actually want to use tools going forward. Now the next step to this is it's not just the operator how do they actually where do they want to put these tools how they interact with these tools as well as quite frankly is how let's say a DevOps team or an application team or a cloud team also wants to take advantage of the programmability of the underlying network and this is where we're moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right? Which has really two angles that is the cloud native way how applications are being built and then there is the cloud native way how you interact with infrastructure, right? And so what we have done is we're a putting in place the unramps between clouds and then on top of it we're exposing for all these tools APIs that can be used and leverage by standard cloud tools or cloud native tools, right? And one example or two examples we always have and again, we're on this journey for a while is both Ansible script capabilities that exist from Red Hat as well as Hashitya Terraform capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure automation and what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do or even the app team they want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically instantiation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these capability as an interface for all our networking tools, right? Whether this is ICE, what I just mentioned whether this is our DCN controllers in the data center whether these are the controllers in the campus for all of those we have cloud native interfaces so operator or DevOps team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lifts on the cloud or with everything how they build the application. Dennis, this is key. You can't even have the conversation of cloud operating model that includes and comprises on-prem without programmable infrastructure so that's very important. Last question, Thomas. Are customers actually using this you made the announcement today are there any examples of customers out there doing this? We do have a lot of customers out there that are moving down the path and using the Cisco high performance infrastructure but also the compute site as well as on the Nexus site. One of the customers and this is like an interesting case is Rakuten. Rakuten is a large technical provider a mobile 5G operator in Japan and expanding in us in different countries. And so people are something all cloud you must be talking about the public cloud provider the big three or four but if you look at it there's a lot of the tackle service providers that actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very proud to work together with Rakuten and help them building a high performance data center infrastructure based on 100 gig and actually 400 gig to drive their deployment to it's a 5G mobile cloud infrastructure which is where the whole world what correctly is going. And so it's really exciting to see this development and see the power of automation visibility together with the high performance infrastructure becoming a reality and delivering actually services. Yes, some great points you're making there. I mean, yes, you have the big four clouds that are enormous but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds telcos that are either proximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyperscalers may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So that's a great case study. Thomas, hey, great having you on. Thanks so much for spending some time with us. Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in tech events coverage.