 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, we're here at Cisco Live San Diego. You're watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host is Dave Vellante and happy to welcome to the program. First of all, I have JL Valente, no relation. I was the Vice President of Product Management for our cloud platform and solutions group at Cisco and joining us is also Santanu Descupta, who's a distinguished systems engineer at Cisco. We're going to be talking about service providers. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Of course. All right, so JL, let's start. The service provider group, of course, we've heard for a long time how important service providers are out there, everything from service providers we're going to become the new channel. As customers less and less are building their own data centers, service providers become a bigger environment. Tell us a little bit about your org and the latest of what's going on in your customers. Yeah, so at Cisco, obviously, they are trying to help bring the transformation toward actually multi-cloud, leveraging actually the cloud benefits not only for enterprises and public sectors, but also for the service providers so that they can also reap the benefit of the new actually trends and technologies coming out, including 5G. And in that context, obviously, if you really want to take advantage of 5G in a proper way, going forward, starting actually with an evolution of architectures, you really have to look at the cloud and specifically what we call the telco cloud. Yeah, so the SP market is going through a mass-scale transformation and transformation in the business model and the architecture and how you take the services to the market. And one key enabler of the transformation that we believe is virtualization. Adapting the whole notion of telco cloud where you virtualize your core functions for enabling the delivery of services in a more agile fashion into the market. But also it's all about transforming the core services construct itself. How do we push some of the services element into the edge of the network being closer to the proximity of the end user so that it enables much lower latency and new monetizable applications which is where service products have a lot of hope on right now. Yeah, so if I could just dig in on that for a second. You talk about services, so we watched that wave of network functions virtualization or NFV where before it was, I just had lots of appliances and rolling out each service individually as opposed to what people want is they want the basically app market for the enterprise. And I just want to be able to get my services when I'm a consumer and I want to do things well. I've got the internet and I get those things. I need a similar environment from the service providers going out to the enterprise. Do I have that kind of high level right? Yeah, so actually we are on that path. Are we there completely here as an industry? We are on the journey to actually get there and though we initially talked about most of the core functions, like think of a mobile packet code or policy or some value added engineer at the back end, but the world is evolving faster to actually also think through that how we can add more consumer facing applications and services on top of it, like augmented reality, virtual reality, cloud gaming and all that sort of stuff. Jaya, this is a real imperative for telcos and it's a complicated situation, right? Because they've got decades and decades of infrastructure built up. Don Tapscott famously said one time that God may have created the world in six days, but he didn't have an install base. And so the telcos, they have kind of a fossilized, hardened install base built around making sure it's up and not necessarily agile. Now you've got all these over the top players coming in adding all these value other services on top of dumb pipe. The prices are coming down. The demand for data is going up. So they've got to change. That's right. So what do they have to do and what role does Cisco play? So again, it's all about that software defined transformation end to end that is required. And they, you know, we'll talk certainly a bit more about the Rakuten example that was actually even showcased briefly this morning. Because certainly obviously it's a green field operator. So it's a bit of a difference, but we think that there is a lot of applicability to Brownfield as well, to the legacy. You have to actually chuck into the different domains what that service provider environment and really start looking at how you can offer both consumer services and business services at a price point, at a level of automation and agility that makes sense. And that is pretty much comparable to a large extent to what the cloud providers are doing. There are advantages that service providers have in terms of obviously the services that they deliver today. The assets that they own, the proximity, the locations as well that they have, the relationships. But really there is a, as we said earlier, massive transformation that starts with the network, but also with those pockets where you need to softwareize or turn to software, many of those assets. So you're essentially talking about a specialized telco cloud, if you will. So how is that different from the clouds that we know, the private clouds, the hybrid clouds, the public clouds? What are the attributes that are different and how do people, how do companies, telcos get in that journey? Yeah, well, I mean, if you look at the telco industry in general, including ourselves, like the vendors, I mean, I call myself or ourselves as like, you know, coming back from the era of dinosaurs, right? So, I mean, if you look at the access technology for the last three decades, what have changed? Nothing, right? We have been moving from 1G to 2G to 3G to 4G, now we are talking of 5G, without talking of a fundamentally disruptive or differentiated architecture, right? So that's something which is actually being, coming up all in the front front at the moment, and that's changing the way the networks can be built, how we can break the monolithic supply chain and adopt a more decomposed, disaggregated architecture. And also at the same time, drive all the services and applications in a more distributed manner with a flexible placement capability, so that you can enable all sort of new applications and services. And again, I mean, at the end, given the fact that this is mostly a brownfield environment, it is largely all about culture transformation, given the fact that, you know, unless the people process some of the culture evolves, this would be a very tough journey moving forward. One of the points, back to your question as well is, though there are nuances, big ones, between an IT cloud, today and the cloud that are generally cloud, general purpose cloud that are offered, you know, by our obviously partners, AWS, Microsoft, Google, et cetera, and really a telco cloud. Based on the nature of those network functions, the workloads, and the nature of those workloads, the traffic demand that they have, the understanding or at least how the hardware itself or the underpinning, the infrastructure needs to have some specific attributes to make this work at scale. But we're trying to mimic as much as possible the scaling capabilities, the flexibility, the agility, the elasticity of a cloud, so that service providers can reap the profit off pretty much a general cloud environment. So conceptually, there are a lot of similarities. I presume that from a developer standpoint, there's a DevOps analog, maybe a cloud native, maybe serverless, something like serverless functions in telco cloud. Absolutely, absolutely. So what we see is the IT and the telco world are actually coming together because I need a lot of telco expertise, but also at the same time, I need a lot of IT expertise because that's what exactly is right now happening. I mean, there are some fundamental differences between a standard IT private or hybrid cloud and a telco cloud. Like, I deploy thousands or hundreds of locations or still a few locations. The applications are different. It's highly IO intensive. You're dealing with a lot of packets like millions of packets, which are mostly a transiting function, going in and out. But having said that, while this initial deployment wave is being targeted for mostly for those telco type of applications, we are seeing a very clear demand and a journey towards a common goal of setting up a one unified cloud, right? So that you can host IT and telco all in the same cloud and that's exactly what DevOps actually takes on reality. Well, and one of the things I'm surprised we haven't touched on yet is edge computing is critical for these environments and I can't just have bespoke solutions for all of them. From my core to edge to telco, there needs to be communications amongst all of these because data is going to flow between them and therefore it can't be motes in between them. I need to be able to pass data and have my applications access these various pieces. Absolutely. In fact, the way we have built or conceived some of the systems is a unified architecture that is distributed as a telco cloud so that actually from the new service managers or the new SSB SS, they see actually one unified cloud with placement capabilities based on constraints where you can actually put the workloads where they need to be based on SLAs, based on requirements and technical resources that are available from a far edge to a central DC and all the way to actually a public cloud because we're starting seeing some of the customers around the world. It's really a massive transformation that is global. Some of them are starting to look at how they can leverage the public cloud for bursting purposes, for disaster recovery or even for other functions for specific applications that may be less demanding actually on the IO side. Well, Santana, you were talking about how one of the differences is that the telcos are more distributed, greater IO intensity. My question is, can we learn from the telco clouds from a security model standpoint? Because normally you think, oh, telcos are kind of behind the traditional IT but from a security model, it sounds maybe more challenging. And you always hear the traditional IT say, oh, it's going to the edge. The telco's already there. So is the security model actually more advanced and what can we learn from that and how is it evolving? Yeah, the security model is still evolving, right? So in fact, I would say for the telco cloud which is being done at the more core central data center location, the security model is pretty advanced. But when things go towards the edge, especially edge computing, which is huge, the security model is actually evolving. And we see a lot of promises with things such as, you know, a secure chain of trust or even blockchain actually coming there and trying to play a huge role. So I think that's one area which we expect to evolve over the next few years. It's a lot of challenge, but also, you know, it's very exciting in that particular space. And actually those, this is a very key point because that infrastructure from service providers is actually usually in many of the countries part of the national assets. The cyber security is the agencies in those countries work actually with Cisco, security trust office and others to really make sure that we do have a level of security that goes beyond maybe even the boundaries of what we see in an enterprise. So yes, to your point, there is a lot of advances in that area as well. All right, so JL, half the shows I've been to this year have had a breakout for telco. There's no denying that there's a lot of growth and a lot of change happening in that environment. What differentiates Cisco's approach from the rest of the people looking at the multi-cloud and software pieces of the world? So multiple areas. First obviously we have this multi-cloud or this hybrid cloud view in which we have worked with the best out there. The web scale providers, the cloud providers. In fact, if I look at Rakuten and others, there are even mimicking this notion of SRE, the Google approach to really the reliability, engineering the transformation of those cloud in a very specific way. The other aspect is we're doing it. We have a holistic view at the telco cloud. It's not just the infrastructure, it's the automation. The automation is absolutely critical that there is absolutely no touch from humans to be able actually to manage that scale. Even more so, if you deploy it in thousands of edge points, it has to be completely actually automated. So the aspect of automation, the aspect of security, the aspect of people transformation organizational as well is something that between the service component to the solution and the products is very unique in what we do at Cisco. Yeah, if I may just add one thing on top of that just Jill said, right? So if you look at our play in the SP or telco market, we have a comprehensive solution. We have solutions right from routing, optical, data center, compute, telco cloud, virtualization, automation, mobile core, BNG, CMT, a bunch of stuff. But what becomes very interesting is if you look at 5G and we all are talking of that 5G is going to be all about enterprise services. Now think about it for a while, right? Who is the number one dominant player in the market and enterprise with the deepest portfolio of solution and the farthest reach in the enterprise market? That's us. Oh, Cisco. Yeah. So that's what we believe that we can actually really, you know, create a right confluence of both the side of the technology to create a right offer for our customers and help them to take to the market. In fact, we've taken a number of our very large enterprise customers to that journey to understand from their point of view as well how they could leverage 5G, Wi-Fi 6 in the context of a mobile first, cloud first type environment. And it's across permeates actually obviously what those service providers need to offer to grow again beyond consumer services which is not where actually the, you know, the hyper growth will be as far as service is concerned. All right, well, J.L. and Santanu, thank you so much for sharing the updates of what's happened in the telco service provider space. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. All right, we'll be back with lots more. Wall to Wall coverage here at Cisco Live San Diego 2019 for Dave Vellante. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. Thank you.