 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to San Diego, everybody. We're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're covering day two here of Cisco Live 2019. Anand Oswald is here. Excuse me, he's the Senior Vice President of Enterprise Networking Engineering at Cisco and John Apostolopoulos. The Italians and the Greeks, we have a lot in common. He is the VP and CTO of Enterprise Networking at Cisco. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. How'd I do? You did awesome. Not too bad, right? Thank you. All right, good deal, Anand. Let's start with you. You guys have had a bunch of news lately. You're really kind of rethinking access to the network. Can you explain what's behind that to our audience? Yeah, if you think about it, the network is running more and more critical infrastructure. At the same time, it's increasing both in scale and complexity. What we expect is that you want to be always wireless on. The workspace is on the move. You're working here in your office, in the cafe, in the soccer field everywhere. You want an uninterrupted, unplugged experience. For that, it's wireless first. It's cloud-driven and it's data optimized. So we had to rethink how we do access. It's not just about your laptops and your phones on the wireless network. In the enterprise, it's digital management systems, IoT devices. Everything's connected wirelessly. And we need to rethink the access on that part. So John, this obviously ties into, you hear all the buzz about 5G and Wi-Fi 6. Can you explain the connection, and what do we need to know about that? Okay, so 5G and Wi-Fi 6 are two new wireless technologies which are coming about now, and they're really awesome. So Wi-Fi 6 is the new version of Wi-Fi. It's available today, and it's going to be available predominantly indoors, as we use Wi-Fi indoors in high-density environments, where you need a large number, large data weight per square meter. You're going to have Wi-Fi once again, the new Wi-Fi 6 provided in the coverage indoors. 5G is going to be used predominantly outdoors in the cellular frequency, replacing conventional 4G or LTE. And it'll provide you the broad coverage as you roam around outdoors. And what happens though is we need both. You need great coverage indoors, which Wi-Fi 6 can provide, and you need great coverage outdoors which 5G will provide. The 4G explosion kind of coincided with mobile, obviously, and that caused a huge social change. And of course, social media took off. What should we expect with 5G? Is it, you know, I know adoption is going to take awhile, they'll talk about that, but it feels like it's more sort of B2B driven. But maybe not. Can you give us thoughts there? You see, Wi-Fi 6 and 5G are actually built on some similar fundamental technology building blocks. You know, you'll all be in the ball game, or the Warriors game like a few weeks ago when they were winning. And after a great play, you're trying to send that message, a video to your kids, something, and the Wi-Fi is slow, latency. With Wi-Fi 6, you won't have that problem. Because Wi-Fi 6 has four times the latency, the four times the throughput, and capacity as existing Wi-Fi, lower latency. And also the battery life, you know, people say that battery is the most important thing today, like in the Maslow hierarchy chart. Three times the battery life for Wi-Fi 6 endpoints. So you're going to see a lot of use cases where you have interworking between Wi-Fi 6 and 5G. Wi-Fi 6 for indoors and 5G for outdoors, and then there'll be some small overlap. But the whole idea is that how do you ensure that these two disparate access networks are talking to each other, exchanging security, policy, for analytics and visibility. Okay, so, first of all, you're a Warriors fan, right? Yeah, I am. So awesome. We want to see this series keep going. Game six, maybe. That was really exciting. Now, of course, I'm a Bruins fan, so we're on the plane the other night, and the JetBlue TV shut down, so I immediately went to the mobile. But it was a terrible experience. I was going crazy. Texting my friends, what's happening? You're saying that won't happen with 5G and Wi-Fi 6? Exactly. Oh, awesome. So, John, help connect for us, Enterprise Networking. We've been talking about the new re-architectures. You know, there's ACI, there's now intent-based networking. How does this play into the 5G and Wi-Fi 6 discussion that we're having today? So, one of the things that really matters to our customers and to everybody, basically, is they want these sort of end-to-end capability. They have some devices. They want to talk to applications. They want access to data. They want to talk with other people or to IoT things. So you need this sort of end-to-end capability wherever the ends are. So one of the things we've been working on a number of years now, it's first of all intent-based networking, which we announced two and a half years ago, and then multi-domain, where we try to connect across the different domains. Across campus and WAN and data center, all the way to the cloud and across the service fighter network, and to add security as foundational across all of these. This was something that Dave Geckler and Chuck Robbins talked about at their keynote yesterday, and this is a huge area for us because we're going to make this single orchestrated capability for our customers to connect end-to-end no matter where the end devices are. All right, so Anand, I have to believe that it's not the poor administrator that's saying, oh my God, I have all these pieces that I need to manage them. Is this where machine learning and AI come in to help me with all these disparate systems? Absolutely, our goal is very simple. Any user on any device should have access to any application. Whether it's sitting in a data center, in a cloud or multiple clouds, or any network. You want that securely and seamlessly. You also want to make sure that it's, the whole network is orchestrated, automated, and you have the right visibility. Visibility is for IT and visibility for business insights. Talk of AI and ML, what's happening is that as the network is growing in complexity and scale, the number of alerts are growing up the vasu. So you are not able to filter it out. That's where the power of AI and machine learning comes. Think about it. In the Industrial Revolution, the Industrial Revolution made sure that you don't have the limitations of what humans can do. Right, you had machines. And now we want to make sure that businesses can benefit in the digital revolution. That you're not limited by what I can pass through all the logs and scrolls. I want to automate everything. And that's the power of AI and machine learning. Are there use cases where you would want some human augmentation where you don't necessarily want the machine taking over for you? Or do you see this as a fully automated type of scenario? Yeah, so what happens is, first of all, visibility is really, really important. The operator or the network wants to have visibility and they want end to end across all these domains. So the first thing we do is we apply a lot of machine learning to get, to take the immense amount of data as Anand mentioned and to translate it into a piece of information, into insights, into what's happening. So then we can share it to the user and they can have visibility in terms of what's happening, how well it's happening, are they anomalies or is it a security threat so forth? And then we can find them additional feedback. Hey, this is anomaly, this could be a problem. This is the root cause of the problem and we believe these are the solutions for it. What do you want to do? Do you want to actuate one of these solutions? And then they get to choose. I mean, if you think of it the other way, our goal is really take the bits and bytes of data on the network, convert that data into information, that information into insights, that insights that lead to outcomes. Now you want to also make sure that you can augment the power of AI and machine learning on those insights so you can build on exactly what's happening. So for example, you want to first baseline your network. What's normal for your environment? And when you have deviations, then that's anomalies. Then you narrow down exactly what the problem is and then you want to automate the remediation of that problem. That's the power of AI and memory. When you guys as engineers, when you think about applying machine intelligence, there's a lot of innovation going on there. Do you home grow that? Do you open source it? Do you borrow? Explain the philosophy there in terms of from a development standpoint. From a development point of view, it's a combination of all these aspects. Like we will not reinvent the wheel, but already exist. But there's always a lot of secrets or that you need to apply because everything flows through the network. If everything flows through the network, Cisco has a lot of information. It's not just a data lake. We have a data source as well. So taking this disparate source of information, normalizing it, harmonizing it, creating a query language, applying the algorithm of AI and machine learning. Like for example, we do the model learning and training in the cloud. We do inference in the cloud and you push the rules down. So it's a combination of all of the aspects. And you use whatever cloud tooling is available. But it sounds like it's really from a Cisco engineering standpoint. It's how you apply the machine intelligence for the benefit of your customers and those outcomes versus us thinking of Cisco as this new AI company, right? That's not the latter. It's the former. Is that fair? So one of the things that's really important is that as you know, Cisco has been making, we've been designing our ASICs for many years with really, really rich telemetry. And as you know, data is key to doing good machine learning and stuff. So we've been designing the ASICs to do real time at wire speed telemetry and also to do various sorts of algorithmic work on the ASIC to figure out, hey, what is the real data you want to send up? And then we've optimized the OS, iOS XE, to be able to perform various algorithms there. And also host containers where you can do more machine learning at the switch, at the router, even in the future, maybe at the AP. And then with DNA Center, we have been able to gather all the data together in a single data lake where we could perform machine learning on top. That's a really important point John mentioned because you want layer one to layer seven analytics. And that's why the catalyst 9120 access point we launched has the Cisco RF ASIC. It provides things like clean air for spectrum, but also that analytics from layer one level all into layer seven. Yeah, I really like the line actually from Chuck Robbins yesterday. He said, the network sees everything and Cisco wants to give you that visibility. Can you walk us through some of the new pieces? What people either things that they might not have been aware of or new announcements this week? As part of the Cisco AI network analytics, we announced three things. The first thing is automated baselining. What that really means is that what's normal for your environment, right? Because what's normal for your own environment may not be the same for my environment. Once I understand what that normal baseline is, then as I have deviations, I can do anomaly detection. I can correlate and aggregate issues. I can really print down, apply AI and machine learning and narrow down the issues that are most critical for you to look at right now. Once I narrow down the exact issue, I want to do the next thing. And that is what we call machine reasoning. And machine reasoning is all about automating the workflow of what you need to do to debug and fix the problem. You want the network to become smarter and smarter the more you use it. And all of this is done through model learning and training in the cloud, inference in the cloud, and pushing it down the rules as we have devices online, on-prem. So do you see the day, if you think about the roadmap for machine intelligence, do you see the day where the machine will actually do the remediation of that workflow? Absolutely. That's what we need to get to. When you talk about the automated baselining, I mean, there's obviously a security use case there. Maybe talk about that a little bit. And are there others? I mean, it really depends on your objective, right? If my objective is to drive more efficiency, you know, lower costs, I presume a baseline is where you start, right? So when I say baseline, what I mean really is like, say if I tell you that from this laptop to connect to the Wi-Fi network, it took you three seconds. And I ask you, is that good or bad? You'll say, I don't know. What's the baseline for this environment? What's normal? And next time if you take eight seconds and your baseline is three, something is wrong. But what is wrong? Is it a laptop issue? Is it a version on your device? Is it an application issue? A network issue? An RF issue? I don't know. That's why AI machine learning will do exactly what the problem is. And then you use machine reasoning to fix the problem. So, okay, this is probably a stupid question, but how much data do you actually need and how much time do you need to actually do a good job in that type of use case? What happens is you need the right data, okay? And you're not sure where the right data is. So originally what we do, a lot of our expertise at CISCRAS for 20 years is figuring out what the right data is. And also with a lot of the machine learning we've done, as well as the machine reasoning where we put together templates and so forth, we've basically gathered the right data for the customer and we refine that over time. So over time, like this venue here, the way this venue's network, what it is, how it operates and so forth, varies with time and we need to refine that over time, keep it up to date and so forth. And when we talk about data, we're talking about tons of metadata here, right? I mean, do you ever see the day where there'd be more metadata than data? Yeah, it's a rhetorical question. All right, so. It's true though, it's true, right? We're here in the DevNet Zone, lots of people learning about building infrastructure as code. Tell us how the developer angle fits into what we've been discussing here. Oh yes, so what happens is as part of IntentFace is that we're going to key parts the automation, right? And then another key part's the assurance. Well, what DevNet's trying to do right now by working with engineering, with us and various partners and other customers is they're putting together what are the key use cases that people have and what is code that can help them get that done? And what they're also doing is they're looking through the code, they're improving it, they're trying to instill best practice and stuff. So it's a reasonably good code that people can use and start building off of. So we think this can be very valuable for our customers to help move into this more advanced automation and so forth. So architecture matters, we've got a touch upon it, but I want you to talk more about multi-domain architecture. We heard Chuck Robbins talk about it. What is it, why is it such a big deal and how does it give Cisco competitive advantage? Think about it, I mean, multi-domain architecture is nothing but all the components of a modern enterprise network behind the scenes. From giving access to a user or device to access to the application and everything in between. Now traditionally, each of these domains like an access domain, the van domain can have hundreds and thousands of network nodes and devices. Each of these are configured generally manually to CLI. Multi-domain architecture is all about stretching these various domains into one cohesive. Data-driven, automated, programmable network. Your campus, your branch, your van, your data center and cloud with security as an integral part of it, if at all. So it's really a customer view of an architecture, isn't it? Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely. Okay, that's good, I like that answer. I thought you were going to come out with a bunch of Cisco mumbo jumbo and secret sauce, but it really is, you guys thinking about, okay, how would our customers need to architect their network? Exactly, because if you think about it, it's all about a customer use case. For example, like we talked earlier, today we are working everywhere. Like on the pool side, in the cafe, in the office and always on the go. You're accessing your business critical applications, whether it's WebEx, salesforce.com, O365. At the same time, you're doing Facebook and WhatsApp and YouTube and other applications. Cisco's SD van domain will talk to Cisco's ACI domain, exchange SLAs and policies. So now you can prioritize that application that you want, which is business critical. And take the right path for the best experience for you. Because you want the best experience for that app no matter where you are. Well, and there's security implications too. I mean, you're basically busting down the security silos and sort of the intent here, right? Yeah, absolutely. Great. All right, last thoughts on the show. San Diego, last year we were in Orlando, we were in Barcelona earlier this year. I think it's been great so far. If you think about it, in the last two years we've filled out the entire portfolio for the new access network. On the Catalyst 9100 access points with Wi-Fi 6, the switches, next generation campus core, the wireless LAN controller, eyes for unified policy, DNA center for automation, analytics, DNA spaces for business insights. The whole access network has been reinvented and it's a great time. Nice, strong summary, but John, we'll give you the last word. What happens here is also everything that Anand says and we have 5,000 engineers who've been doing this over multiple years and we have a lot more in the pipe. So you're going to see more in six months from now, more in nine months and so forth. It's a very exciting time. Excellent. It's clear you, like you say, completing the portfolio, positioning for the next wave of access. So congratulations on all the hard work. I know a lot goes into it. Thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Lisa Martin is also in the house. We'll be back with theCUBE Cisco Live 2019 from San Diego.