 Next, Oracle Open World, right Stu, joined in this segment by Stu Miniman from Wikibon and also JP Van Steerdigen, did I get it right? You got it right. All right, thanks. Senior Director, Systems Engineer, Worldwide Data Center Virtualization at Cisco. It's a big title. Yes, indeed. It's a big title and a great job. And a great job. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So we had you on last year. Right. So the year has passed, cloud keeps growing. What are some of the things you've seen since we last had you on a year ago? Yeah, that's a really great question. I think what we've seen since last year, what's been happening is that our customers are starting to become really concerned about digital disruption, right? They're concerned about the six people in a garage that are trying to disrupt their business. And in order to that, they're looking at technology to help either enable their strategy or differentiate their strategy or really define their strategy. You know the examples out there, right? Airbnb, Uber technology, they're using the technology, mobility in the cloud to really disrupt an existing brick and mortar business, right? Let's say the taxi business or the hotel business and stuff like that. And that's happening across the board. And what that is doing really from an application perspective is kind of creating an application environment which is called by Gardner, mode two IT, right? Which is really focused on agility, being able to develop new applications really quickly, deploy it really quickly into the operational environment without zero downtime, right? Which drives a totally different IT infrastructure requirement. What we're seeing is that a lot of our established customers, those customers that are deploying Oracle databases, SAP applications, Microsoft collaboration applications and stuff like that, they gotta now run two environments at the same time. A mode one environment which is really focused on limiting risk, avoiding risk, right? And therefore they're looking at highly available infrastructure. And then an environment that enables mode two, which is a totally different infrastructure environment. So that's what they're kind of looking at and we are trying to help them with that transition, which is gonna take, happen over many, many years. Right, what we always talk about is that a character is a stick that's driving the change and you're talking about really, it's the stick. It is the, being afraid of this five person group in a garage that suddenly brings in 100 million dollars of funding as a billion dollar evaluation and Uber's way overused as an example, but who would have ever thought digital transformation could impact the taxi industry of all things? Absolutely and it's all enabled by technology. I would say actually it's defined by, that technology defines the strategy, really. Because they're looking at technology and then they're trying to figure out how can we disrupt an existing business? Using software developers that just graduated college, developing these neat business applications, probably develop it in the cloud, right? And then enable or take advantage of mobile technologies such as Android technology, iOS technology and so on. Really exciting. JP, you bring up some really good points there. We said IT so often they bought on risk. It was before I wanted to buy something because it's safe because if I save somebody a little bit of money, that's great, but if something goes wrong, I'm probably out of a job. But what I hear you saying is, if I don't make a change and if I don't change what I'm doing, we're gonna be out of business. So we'll all be out of a job. So in some ways it's a little bit of a bit flip, but I mean that's serious. People are, especially you talking, I mean enterprise IT is defined by how slow it makes changes. I can't just flip on a dime here. So how did your team help customers that? How are you, your team changing the skill set you're doing to help customers along with some of these digital transformations? That is a really good question because as I said at the beginning, I got a team of people focused on the mode one applications, SAP Oracle, and Microsoft and others, right? But now I'm starting to retrain, develop my team on mode two technologies, DevOps. Things like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, technologies that are used to program the infrastructures, very relevant. Starting to focus a lot more on OpenStack and what that enables from a DevOps perspective. So really retraining my team, but also the larger organization so that we can talk to customers intelligently and we're able to position our solutions intelligently for our customers too. It's interesting the way you split mode one and mode two applications, really ERP and Oracle and SAP as a mode one as you defined it in some of the newer gen stuff as mode two. What's interesting is a lot of those mode one applications were developed back in the day really to support the business, not be the business. Now we're seeing more and more really that IT and the way you execute your IT effectively becomes the business that just happens to be wrapped around a particular service or a particular product or a particular way you've done business. So do you see kind of the importance of what you've defined as mode two? Really escalating and really starting to catch or even surpass in some ways execution of business strategy versus keeping the lights on and keeping everything moving. Yeah, exactly. So from a mode one perspective, an established enterprise, that's how they invoice their customers. That's how they pay their suppliers. That's how they do their HR. That's how they do a lot of different things basically to run the business. But the mode two, it's like, hey, now I got to do something to innovate to disrupt my competitors or to stay on par with some of the disruptors out there, the startups that are out there. So totally different dynamic, right? And there's a lot of startup companies that are kind of building their business around this whole mode two concept. That they run their business, not only are they going after new opportunities using this mode two technology, but they're also running their business using mode two types of technologies, right? Like whether it's service now, where there's a lot of software as a service types of companies out there that offer financial packages, ERP packages, HR packages, and stuff like that. So JP, here this week, we've heard a lot from Oracle about cloud and security's been a top of mind issue. Your team, as you're talking to customers, what are the big issues that they're grappling with when it comes to Oracle environments? What's the top of mind issues? What are they looking to both Cisco and the ecosystem for help with? When it comes to Oracle? So cloud security, what are the top of mind Oracle related issues that your customers are striving with, your team helps with? So I would say that for most of the customers that are running an Oracle type of a business, right? Production environment based on Oracle, they're not going to do anything dramatic with it from a public cloud perspective. It's probably going to stay there in the private cloud on premises, right? They're not going to mess around with their business critical data. What we're seeing though is that in many of these mode one environments, there's always a production environment, but also a QA environment, the training environment, development environment. People are maybe looking at those, non-production environments to run them in a public cloud. That's a possibility, right? As long as the data can reside on premises, then I think many customers will consider that like a safe cloud type of a strategy. Moving to the cloud is something, in my mind, is a multi-year journey. It's going to take a lot more time, it's going to take a lot more time than many people thought many years ago. I think the private cloud will always continue to be a substantial part of the market and the public cloud will grow over time, but not as fast as people originally thought. All right, security is that that seems to have bubbled up. I mean, security's always been important, but even more so these days. Security is huge, not only in the cloud environment, but if you think about it, the whole emergence of bringing your own device, the whole emergence of the cloud, it really requires that you have an end-to-end security architecture. And having point product solutions that address security issues, whether it's firewalls, intrusion detection systems, malware protection systems and stuff like that, these things don't work. You can't have a security architecture based on 25 different products, point products. You got to have an end-to-end architecture. And that is what we are trying to establish in the marketplace at Cisco. So, JP, if you had a chance to attend any of the sessions or walk the show floor here, just curious, what's your impressions of Oracle Open World 2015 so far? Anything different from previous years? I think there's a lot of focus on cloud this year, it seems to me. And I know there's a cloud session that starts off at 1.30. I definitely plan to go to that one. The other piece of it is really, is the way that people interact now with companies has changed significantly. We've interviewed, we had the bank on, the bank interfaces with most of their customers electronically now. It's all moved to these new interfaces, whether it's on their phone, via an application, et cetera. How are you seeing that kind of roll into the data center and the impacts of the data center, where now these, what formerly would be kind of secondary interaction methods are now moving to the forefront, if not the primary way, that people interact with other companies. What's the impact you see there in the data center? Yeah, what it means from a data center perspective, right, the more people that interact with an application to do business with your company, drives a lot more requirements for servers inside of the data center. So your data centers become more and more important. Which means also that I'm a online banking user, I want that application to be up and running 24 by seven. 366 days a week, a year, right? So it can go down either, right? And you look at that, right? And there you see established companies really running mode one and mode two in parallel. Mode two being the customer facing web-based applications can never be down, always got to be up, right? Being used to really kind of differentiate how you do business with customers, right? And then your mode one, which again is running your business in the background. So, JP, when I think about technology, most of my career, it feels like the vendors are pushing new stuff and the customers are like, that's great, but I'm not ready for it, I'm not sure. We talked at the beginning of the interview how things seem to be picking up. I'm curious, how are your customers coping with change? How's your team coping with change? And do you find more that customers are now coming to you and your team asking about new things? They're talking about DevOps, they're thinking about not just cloud, but containers, there's IoT, there's all these new things out there. How much of it now is the customer trying to get that competitive advantage by adopting new technology? It's happening more and more because right now this week, the OpenStack Summit is going on in Tokyo, right? And I can tell you a lot of our customers are there kind of exploring what OpenStack enables for them. And you have other conferences like you know, like Velocity and stuff like that that are really focused on DevOps. So our customers are learning all the time and as they learn, we hope that they also continue to come to us for the answers. But as our customers are learning, they also push ourselves, Cisco, to make sure we stay up to speed with these new emerging technologies because we know that although the adoption may not be as fast as you know, the market fund that may believe it is, it's going to happen and we got to be part of that. The other big trend that we're seeing more and more is really the idea of sustainability. And as more and more of the compute has shifted to data centers and they keep growing and they're taking more and more of the load, there's obviously concerns about power consumption, both for the CPUs as well as the air conditioning and et cetera. How does sustainability and really kind of thinking in terms of those parameters impacting what you guys are doing and what you're delivering to the marketplace? Well, you know, traditionally, I would say like, you know, six years ago when we introduced our compute platform to the marketplace, that was one of our key advantages, right? The operational efficiencies, you know, power reduction, cabling reduction, you know, increased cooling, you know, the reduction in the amount of servers and stuff like that. That was really the way we got into the marketplace because we came out with a solution that was the most efficient out there. But, you know, that hasn't gone away. You know, people are still focused on, you know, optimizing their TCO, right? Whether it's going with established applications or with, you know, emerging applications. It's always going to continue to be important. You will see, though, that, you know, with things like open source, people are going to find very attractive the fact that from a CAPEX perspective, the cost is very low. They'll find out very quickly, though, that the OPEX is going to be much larger than in the more established mode one environment. So it's like, you know, is there really going to be an advantage from a TCO perspective when you compare the two after like, you know, 10, 20 years, right? Right. So, but I think, you know, power and cooling and real estate always going to be issues. So I'll give you the last word before we let you go. So when we see you next year, what do you have been working on? What's going to be, you know, get you excited about kind of the next 12 months which you guys are working on? Yeah, so what makes me really excited over the next year or so is, you know, I believe that this whole transition to mode two is only starting right now. And I think next year will be really the dick of it in my opinion. So. All right, well we look forward to the update. So thanks for stopping by again, JP. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Great, JP Ben Sturtigen from Cisco sitting with us here at theCUBE at Oracle Open World 2015. I'm Jeff Frick with Stu Miniman. We'll see you with our next guest after this short break. Thanks for watching.