 from Houston, Texas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Now your host, Jeff Brick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Welcome to Houston, Texas. We are theCUBE and we are at the Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing. 2015, 12,000 women, I think about 1,000 men, my bad says 13,000 and something. All come together for a three day show that really celebrates women in computer science. It's got recruiting tracks, it's got technology tracks, it's got executive leadership tracks. Now they're adding early career tracks, mid-career tracks. So it's really something like nothing that we go to. It's not a world, it's not a summit. It truly is a celebration and we're really excited to be joined by our next guest, Liz Santoni, the vice president engineering from Cisco. Welcome, Liz. Good to be here, thank you for having me. Absolutely, so first off, terrific booth. I mean, when we came in on Wednesday for a setup, your guy's booth really stood out amongst all of them and it's got a very special kind of this symbol, this kind of statuette, I don't know how to describe her, so it has a name, Penelope. Absolutely, so Penelope is supposed to signify the innovator inside all of us. In our Cisco, we're a technology company and innovation is what drives us, from enabling, from differentiating to disrupting. But technology alone doesn't innovate, it's people who innovate. And so there's no innovation without people and there's definitely no innovation without women. So we wanted to have Penelope out there to inspire kind of this broader community to say Penelope is the innovator inside all of us. Yeah, you've got the Penelope t-shirt on, Team Penelope, you've got the magazine, which I guess is more of a comic book. It's a comic book. Kind of old school with all the gamers these days, you went back to paper, but it's good. But talk about the event itself. You said Cisco's been involved for a number of years, but you guys really stepped up your involvement. What does Grace Hopper mean for Cisco and what you guys are trying to do? So just of being here over the last three days, and I'm sure you've experienced this as well, this is an incredibly inspiring place to be. And we decided to invest about 300 of our engineers and bring them over. We wanted to have them experience this both as a personal and professional development. You get the opportunity to hear from not tens, but hundreds of women who are inventing, innovating, and changing the way we all, the world, lives, works, and plays. And it's not just inspirational, I would say it's aspirational, because when you see just a handful of women, it's inspirational and it's great. But I'm not sure if you aspire to that, because it just seems like, well, it's just for the few. You look around here, you attend the sessions, and you see like there's hundreds of women every single day who are innovating and who are inventing. It gives the rest of us the courage to go after our dreams. And it's about building a community, the confidence, professional and personal development, and that's what Grace Hopper is about. It's about the empowerment. That's what Cisco wanted our teams to experience as well. We completely are aligned with the philosophy of Grace Hopper, and this year, we decided to take kind of what we've done in prior years and kind of put it on steroids. Yeah, double down and then a little bit more. I know it's pretty crazy, you walk into the keynote room, and we've never been to this convention center in Houston. It's just one really big, long, rectangular space, and you're like, no way is this thing going to fill up, no way. You know, great speakers, Hillary Mason, Cheryl Sandberg, but sure enough, it fills up all the way to the back. It's a weird effect when people applaud because you get kind of these waves through this huge sea of people. But you know, a little bit more detail about the 300 women, that's a huge investment. You're taking them off productive tasks, you're paying T&E to bring them all here, and how are they participating? What are some of the things that they're doing while they're here? So they definitely are attending the sessions because after all, the Grace Hopper is supposed to be about your professional development, your personal development, whether it's tech sessions that you want to attend, career sessions that you want to attend, leadership sessions that you want to attend. It really is about learning and development for our teams, and we wanted to make sure that they're out there experiencing it. We also want them to be at our boot because what we've noticed is that women attract other women. Because if you want to attract kind of, I mean, we start off with, we want diversity in thoughts, in opinions, in perspectives, in experiences, and we definitely want diversity as far as gender is concerned. So we want the young women, early in career, mid-career to come in and talk to people who are at Cisco already. It's like, what's the culture of the company? Why would I want to come work there? Do you like what you do every single day? What are the technologies that you work on? What are the businesses that you work on? What better way than to hear from the people who already work as a company and have made a commitment to stay there for whatever reason that is. So you get kind of the real talk behind it versus a piece of paper that says, here's what we are all about as far as the company is concerned, and that experience has been pretty phenomenal because I've talked to so many of them, and what I would tell them is, especially if you're early in career, here's an opportunity to go to every single booth and know everything that's out there in front of you, and then you get to make a choice, a choice that's all about how the company can conform to you and not about you conforming to the company. Which is interesting, right? That's really kind of the new age, right? And we've had a lot of the younger gals on, which has been terrific, and they're diverse in a number of ways, not just gender and race or anything else, but in terms of interest and passions and things that they do when they're not at work and really a desire to have a life outside of work. So is there any other recruiting event like this so focused on computer science, regardless of male, female? I mean, I've been trying to rack my brain, think of mine. The scale. The scale that Anita Borg puts on is tremendous. And we're a diamond sponsor. The head of engineering, who I report to, is now on the board of Anita Borg. And here's an individual who gets asked a lot to be on the board, both for-profit and non-profit. At the end of the day, he runs a 25,000 person organization. And the only board that he actually accepted is the Anita Borg board. Wow, that's great. I don't know if there's anything else that says for it. The other thing I would say is, we have a new CEO, Chuck Robbins. But he's been in his role for about the last 90 plus days or so, 50% of his leadership team, women. From Kelly Kramer, who's our CFO, or Fran's, who's our HR head. Karen, who's head of marketing. And then you have Ruba, who's his chief of staff. And Rebecca Jacoby, who was our CIO, is now our COO. So these are some pretty whip-smart, phenomenal women. And Chuck's done a great job. He set the tone for the organization. Pankaj is doing that within the engineering organization. Each of the folks there are doing that within their organizations. So I would say is, it makes me proud to work at Cisco. Good, well, it's come up time and time again that a big part of this is the mentoring, is the sponsorship, is the knowledge that there are very senior women in the organization that you can look up to and know that they're there and be able to follow in their path. So does Cisco have any formal mentorship programs, sponsorship programs, how are you guys executing that kind of on a formal basis? So we have both informal and formal mentoring. I'd say 15 years at Cisco, I've had a combination, formal and informal mentoring. And those mentors have changed along the way as my careers have taken a left turn here, right turn, or even straight up, right? So we definitely have formal mentoring programs. I like the informal ones as well. Just a cup of coffee and a chat. We also have formal and informal sponsorships as well. We're trying to get better at sponsorships because there's a difference between mentors and sponsors. It's your, somebody advising you versus somebody advocating and pushing for you. And we're trying to do more of that. Can we do get better at it? Absolutely, in fact, we're here as well to learn from what other companies are doing. So we can take that away. And what's worked as best practices for other companies? We'd like to implement that back home. And then Liz, to explain a little bit too about really the opportunity that's in front of us and the change in the computing industry. I mean, Cisco's networking right in the middle of the computing industry, but you know, we have terrific representation here from financial services, retail, government, education, but between cloud and mobile and big data. I mean, you probably need more people than you can possibly hire, not to mention things like UCS and some of the other initiatives that Cisco has under way. I mean, it's a tremendous time to get in this industry. Absolutely agree. I mean, when I think about it, is every company today calls itself a technology company from Shell to Domino's Pizza to Starbucks because technology enables them to deliver the best customer experience that's out there. So I don't think it's the domain of companies in the Valley anymore. Every company looks at themselves as a technology company. Every company looks at themselves as a digital company. And like you said, what are the disruptors that are out there, right? It's number of increasing in cloud services. It's web, it's social, it's mobile, it's video. All of these are disrupting the way I remember life. And I'm not that old. So when I think about it, it's like, I look around some of the experiences that some of the younger generation has. They kind of, and yesterday I was talking to them in our IoT tech note about just having, we were talking about point of sale. And I said, there's a time I used to go to the grocery store and write a check. I don't think everybody, most of the women in the room like, what's a check? And then I move on to pay with my credit card. Well, last weekend when I was at the grocery store, I didn't have a wallet. My phone was the way I paid. So when you look at it, like you said, it's cloud services, it's data when everything is connected in this hyper world of, the internet of everything and the internet of things with everything connected, you're generating this mass amounts of data. And the question is, what do you do with it? Because if you don't do anything with the data, it's just dumb data that's sitting out there. So the analytics that sits on top of there, it's a big area of investment for us to where you actually take that data and you apply some intelligence. So you have insights that drive decisions. And how do you drive those actions back into kind of the network per se? So part of the reason for being here in our booth is also to showcase the technologies. I mean, we were a company that built the internet with our networking portfolio. But a big area of investment for us is now we're building upon the internet with the internet of things, with security that needs to be pervasive all across. Like you said, with cloud services, with collaboration. So when I think about the opportunities that are available, I think it's only limited by your desire, ambition and drive. Because especially with IoT, I feel like the opportunity to either disrupt a business model, create new businesses is limitless. Yeah, it's way overstated with Uber. But Uber, I mean, again, if you can disrupt the taxi industry, you know, where are the limits? And we actually interviewed a guy from Domino's to think of the impact, the supply chain impact of people ordering pizza via their phone. Forget about just convenience, but just back at headquarters knowing what's ordered. Order accuracy, order timeliness, date on what people are ordering versus some kid taking the call on the phone is pretty amazing. And then of course they had a cool robot keynote this morning showing that they're cruising all around the offices and really getting to all kinds of nuance, layers and layers and layers of technology to drive this internet. Absolutely, you should visit our offices in San Jose where we have a connected workplace. We have robots roaming around. So if you come in, you don't know where I sit, you can actually find me. Just ask the robot, take me. And or, you know, again, we have a portal that allows you to, I come in, scan it in the morning. You don't need to know which desk I'm sitting at or if I'm in a conference room, you're able to find me. You no longer need to pick up the phone and call me and say, hey, where are you? Like people usually go, even before they say hello, they say, hey, where are you? Don't need to do that anymore. That's a, it drives a much better connected workplace experiences and that's why the opportunities in terms of whether it's Uber or Lyft, whether it's auto industry. I think there was a report that was put out by the auto industry that said this new ride sharing and what we're seeing with Uber and Lyft not just disrupts the taxi industry and potentially the logistics industry, but it's very disruptive for the auto industry at large. Not only the auto industry, but cities. I saw one report that they said if everyone used the self-driving cars that are coming, I think much sooner than anyone knows, the amount of cars necessary to move people around, especially in cities, drops by like 80% which, oh by the way, now they don't have to park anymore. So how does that open up cities? So the impacts are just tremendous. But before we wrap, what's the story with Penelope? Is it an ongoing program? How do people learn more? How do they get involved? So definitely come by a booth. We'll tell you more about the story of Penelope. Pick up a comic book. It talks about how Penelope as a coder saves the day, saves the world and ends up forming our own cybersecurity company. And Penelope, like I said, is the innovator inside all of us and we will be continuing with the theme of Penelope. Again, I have a goal and that's the goal I'm hoping that will inspire and others here as well. My goal is one day to have my confidence outweigh my competence. I'm looking to Penelope to do that. Help me do that. Liz, your enthusiasm is contagious. I love it. That's why we call this a celebration. Really, thank you for stopping by. Really thanks to Cisco for making the investment in the show and really having some fun with it as well as touching a lot of your own people as well as a lot of future people. Thank you, it was my pleasure. Absolutely. We will be next week. The Cube's going to Austin, Texas for Dell World. You're not going to want to miss it because when it comes to digital disruption, the EMC Dell merger is probably one of the biggest things in the news right now. We'll have Michael Dell on. We'll be at Oracle Open World the week after that, so tune in if you're not in San Francisco on Howard Street, tune into theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick, we're in Houston at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. We'll be right back after this next, or excuse me, right back with our next guest after this short break.