 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. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day one of our coverage of Cisco Live 2019 from San Diego. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Lisa Martin is also here. Kip Compton is the senior vice president of Cisco's cloud platform and solutions. And he's joined by Fabio Gore. He's the senior director of cloud solutions marketing. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks, great to be here. Thank you for having us. You're very welcome, Fabio. So, Kip, let's start with you. I want to start with a customer perspective. People are transforming cloud as part of that innovation cocktail, if you will. Absolutely. How would you summarize your customers' cloud strategies? Well, I mean, in one word, I'd say multi-cloud. And it's what we've been seeing for some time is customers are really expanding into the cloud and they're really expanding into multiple clouds. And what's driving that is the need to take advantage of the innovation and the economics that are offered in the various clouds. And we like to say that they're expanding into the cloud because for the vast majority of our customers, they have data centers. They're going to continue to have data centers and are things going to keep running in those data centers. Now, what's happening is they thought it would be easy to start with. Everyone, our CEO Chuck likes to talk about how everyone thought they just moved to the cloud, like moving to another neighborhood. Everything would be great. Well, when there are multiple clouds and you're leaving some stuff on-prem all of a sudden, what was supposed to be simple and easy becomes quite complex. Yeah, and I've often said, well, multi-cloud is kind of a symptom of multi-vendor, but what you're saying is essentially it's becoming horses for courses. The workload, matching the workload with the best cloud to solve that problem. I think it's a feature, not a bug. I think it's here to stay. So how is that informing your strategy, Cisco? Well, you know, we're very customer responsive and we see this problem and we look at how we can solve it and what customers have told us is that they want access to the different innovation in these different clouds and the different economic offers in each of these clouds, but they want to do it with less complexity and they want to do it with less friction and there's a bunch of areas where they're not looking for innovation. They don't need things to work differently in networking. They want one way for networking to work across the multiple clouds and frankly, to integrate with their on-prem as well. Likewise for security, a lot of customers are a little freaked out by the idea that there'd be different security regimes in every cloud that they use and maybe even different than what they already have on-prem so they want that to be connected and to work. Management, an application lifecycle, they're worried about that. They're like, they don't want it to be different in every single cloud. AppDynamics is a great example of an asset here. We got strong feedback from our customers that they needed to be able to measure the application performance in a common way across the environments. I mean, imagine going to your CEO and talking about the performance of applications and having different metrics depending on where it's hosted. It doesn't make any sense in terms of getting business insights. So AppDynamics is another example of something that customers want to cross all of that and so we really see Cisco's role as bringing all of those common capabilities and really reducing the complexity and friction of multi-cloud enabling our customers to really take the most advantage possible of multiple clouds. So Fabio Kip talked about how moving to cloud is a little bit more complex than moving house from one neighborhood to the other. What are some of the key challenges that you guys are seeing and how specifically is Cisco helping to ameliorate some of those challenges? Well, there are some challenges that are squarely in the camp where we can help. Others are related and probably they are the toughest in cloud to fundamentally acquisition of talent, right? We can help with our customer, of course, with our partner ecosystem in this case, but a lot of that is really the culture of the company needs to change, right? We keep talking about DevOps and we keep talking about what does it mean operating this infrastructure in the cloud? It's a whole different ball game, right? It's a continuous integration, continuous development is actually moving to agile kind of software development model. And I very often do the analogy of what we've seen a few years ago in the data center space where we saw actually the end of the super specialization, like people only knowing storage, only networking, only computing, and then we saw the rise of people fundamentally expert in the entire stack. We're seeing the same in the cloud, with the rise of the cloud architect. These guys now are the ones that are behind building cloud center of excellence, the issue, if you want guidance, whereas the control remains into the other teams, right? But this is very, very important. So it's overcoming the talent gap and knowing how to deal with that. On the bottom of that, on the other side, sorry, the other flip to the economy is technology challenges. For instance, embracing Kubernetes becomes an embracing open source is a big, big challenge, right? You got to be able to master this kind of science if you want and trust in partners like, for instance, ourselves and others that will give you curated versions of the software. Imagine like, very often I do customer meetings and I ask how many tools do you use in production for your Kubernetes implementation and the answer ranges from 20 to 25. It's crazy, right? So imagine if one, two or three of these tools go away, what are you going to do? So it's a whole different ball game, really, going to this kind of world. So, Kip, we understand today, customers are multi-cloud and in the future, it's going to be multi-cloud. I think so. How do we make sure that multi-cloud doesn't become least denominator cloud or you really say all I have is this combination of a bunch of pieces like the old multi-vendor. How does multi-cloud become more powerful than just the sum of its components? That's a great question and we've really, I mean, we support a lot of different ways of accessing a cloud from Cisco because we have such a broad customer base and our goal is really to support our customers however they want to work. But we have made a bet in terms of avoiding the lowest common denominator. And some people look at accessing multiple clouds as sort of laying down one software platform and writing their software to one set of APIs that they then somehow implement in every cloud. And I think that does tend to get you to the lowest common denominator because if you want to be on a Alexa smart speaker, you have to be on the Lambda service at AWS. That's it. It doesn't exist anywhere else. And so if you're trying to create a common layer across all your clouds and that's your approach, you'd have to give up unique capabilities like that and almost every consumer brand wants to be or needs to be on that Alexa smart speaker. So we actually see it as more taking the functions that are not points of innovation, reducing the friction and leaving our customers with the time and energy to focus on taking advantage of those unique capabilities. And Fabio, you're partnering at Cisco with a number of the providers out there. Where are we with the maturity of all this? We were at the KubeCon show and as you're right, there's a lot of different tools. Simple is not what we're discussing mostly at that show. So what have we solved today and what kind of things does Cisco and its partners look to be solving kind of in the next six to 12 months? Oh, partnering with these big players is absolutely a company priority for us, for Cisco. And one thing that's important is you said multivander at the beginning, that was an interesting comment because if you think about it, multi-cloud is really a business need, right? You want to harness innovation wherever it comes from. But then when you work with a specific provider and you reach critical mass, you want to have integrations with these different providers. And that is the hybrid world. So hybrid is more of a technology need to streamline things like networking or security or the way you do storage across the board, things of this nature. So that clearly is a big need and we'll continue, of course, adding more and more from the standpoint of partnerships. Every one of the environments that our customers want to use is of interest for us, right? To extend our policies, to extend our reach. So just following up on that partnership, you guys are cloud agnostic, you don't own your own clouds, you're not selling that. So you were at Google Cloud Next, you were up on stage, David Geckler, you got a relationship with Azure, you got a relationship with AWS, obviously. So talk about the importance of partnerships and the specific strategy there in terms of your go-to market. Well, you know, first of all, the partnerships are critical. I mean, as you said, we're not trying to move the workloads to our cloud. And by the way, a lot of our customers have said that's something that they value. They see us as one of the biggest, most capable IT companies on the planet that still is somewhat agnostic and able to work with them on what's the right answer for their business, not trying to move everything to one place. And those partnerships are critical. So you're going to see us continue to build on those partnerships. In fact, it's only day one here. I wouldn't be surprised if you saw some news this week on that. Yeah, we were wondering if we were going to see somebody parachute in. That would be exciting. So why Cisco? I'd ask each of you guys. Maybe, Kip, you could give us the answer from your perspective and then I'll ask you the same question. Well, from my perspective, it's based on what our customers tell us. And again, the things that we're very good at, things like networking and security are some of the biggest problems that our customers face in taking advantage of clouds and are some of the things that they most want common across clouds. So we have a very natural role in this. I actually think back to the founding of Cisco. I don't know if you know the story, but it was Sandy Lerner and Lynn Bozak at Stanford. Their networks couldn't talk to each other. Good to remember back to the days like DeckNet and Apple Talk and all these things. It's hard to even recall because this new thing called TCPIP obviously took over. That was the beginning of Cisco is building the multi-protocol router that let those different islands talk to each other. In many ways, customers see us doing sort of the same thing or want us to do the same thing in a multi-cloud world. Well, just an aside before I ask you, Fabio, a lot of people think that the microprocessor revolution killed many computers. IP, Cisco kind of killed many computers to your point. But Fabio, anything you would add to the sort of why Cisco story? Yeah, I would say if you want my three seconds elevator pitch is we make multi-cloud easier and more secure. Multi-cloud is complex. So we definitely make it easier through our software. And we have three big buckets if you want that are really compelling for our customers. The first one is all of our software arsenal around web dynamics, cloud center, workload optimization manager that helps customer in building a unified application management kind of software suite across on-prem and any of the public clouds that we've been talking about. The second one is, as you said, we build on our DNA, which is, if you want, and you heard Dave Geckler today, our multi-domain kind of architecture, right? Which is incredibly relevant in this case. So our networking and security fabric really is important there. And the third is our ability, because we don't compete with any of the big players to partner with them and solve problems for our customers. So these three buckets are really, really important. That deliver a high business value to our customers. Kim, I want to come back to something you were talking about as the customer. You said the customers don't want a different security regime for each cloud. Right. So it's complicated because first of all, they're trying to struggle with their own security regime anyway. Right. So what is the right security regime in this cloud era? How is it evolving? Well, what we're doing is we're bringing tools like Tetration, which now runs on-prem and in the cloud. Things like StealthWatch, which runs on-prem in the cloud. And simply bringing them security frameworks that are very effective. We're, I think, a very capable, well-known security vendor. But bringing them the capability to run the same capabilities in their on-prem environments and their data centers, as well as in multiple public clouds. And that just eliminates the seams that hackers could maybe get into. It makes common policy possible so they can define policy around an application once and have that apply across multiple environments, which not only is easier for them, but eliminates potential mistakes that they might make that might leave things open to a hacker. So for us, it's that simple. Bringing very effective common frameworks for security across all these environments. You certainly see the awareness of the security imperative moving beyond the SecOps team. Oh, yeah. It's now board level. Lines of business are worried about for their digital transformation, who's the data? But are organizations at the point where they're operationalizing the security practices and the like, to the extent that they should be? Well, I mean, I think when you say they should be, there's always room for improvement. Okay. But we're seeing just about all of our customers. I mean, as you said, security is a C-level if not a board-level discussion and just about all of our customers. It's routinely the top first or second concern on a survey when customers talk about what's concerning them with the cloud. And so we're seeing them really view, security is foundational to what they're doing. I mean, it used to be this sort of failure equals fire mentality. Somebody cracks through, you're fired, and so nobody talked about it. Now I think people realize, look, bad guys are going to get through. It's how you respond to them. How you think about, how you're using analytics. Sorry, just a quick comment. We're moving quickly towards, well, more or less quickly to a zero-trust kind of world. If you look at the action of Cisco in this area, for instance, the acquisition of Duo is performing exceptionally well. And if you want, at the top of the security ecosystem in a multi-cloud world, you find identity. Because if you don't know who the user or the thing is that's trying to use a certain application, you're in trouble. Because perimeter security, of course, is important, but you know that you're going to be penetrated. So it boils down to understanding who's doing what and remediating as soon as possible. So it's a whole different paradigm. I mean, security is a huge tailwind for Cisco. It's a business growing 21% a year. It's more than three times the growth of the company overall, which is actually still pretty good at five or six percent. So security, rocket ship. Yeah, Fabio, just, I noticed before we did the interview here that everybody's wearing the T-shirts. The cloud takeover is happening here at the DevNet zone. So give those of us that aren't among the 28,000 here at the show a little bit of what's happening from your time. Yeah, I'm going to do something on you, Joel. I'm going to turn that question to Keith because he was actually on stage the second SIGGOM. I had to just kick that off. I think it links back to what Fabio was talking about with talent. I mean, obviously the most important thing we bring our customers is the technology. We are a technology company, but so many of our customers are asking us to help them with this talent gap. And I think the growth of DevNet, I mean, we're actually sitting here in the DevNet zone. It's got its own area here at Cisco Live. It's gotten bigger every single year here at Cisco Live. The growth of DevNet is a sign of how important its talent issue is, as well as the new certifications that we announced. We expanded our certification program to include software conjunction with DevNet. So now people will be able to get professional certifications from Cisco, not just on networking, but on software capabilities and skills. And this is something both our partners and our customers have told us they're really looking for. Now, in terms of the takeover, it's something fun that the DevNet crew does. I think they're doing five of them during this week. I was really excited. Susie, we asked us to be the first. So we had the opportunity to kick it off. It does include beer. So that's one of the nice things. It includes t-shirts. Both things that I think are prevalent in the developer community, I'll say. And we just have an hour where the focus is on cloud technology. So we've got everyone in cloud t-shirts, a bunch of the experts who are my product and jeering teams are on hand. We had some special presentations. We're just spending an hour focused on cloud. Well, and I love that you're doing that. The DevNet zone, we've always been super impressed with this whole notion of infrastructure as code. I think I've said many times of all the traditional enterprise companies, computer companies, if you will, IT companies. Cisco has done a better job of anybody than making its infrastructure programmable. We're talking about security before it's critical. If you're still tossing stuff over to the operations team, you're going to have exposures, whereas you guys are in a position now, and you talk talent, you're transitioning the role of the CCIE, and now it's becoming essentially a developer of infrastructure as code. I mean, it's a very powerful concept. I think we're helping our partners and our customers transform just as we're transforming. I think it's kind of a symbiotic relationship that's super important to us. It's also important. You think about the balancing act between agility, cost, call it security, or even data assurance. There are trade-offs involved. There's knobs that you have to turn, but can you achieve all three to optimize your business? Look, there may always be trade-offs, but it's not sort of a zero-sum game. In other words, we've seen customers who've automated that through things like CICD move to a different place in a much better place where they're not necessarily making trade-offs on security to get better agility. If they fully automated their deployment chain, so they know that there are no mistakes there, they know that they have the ability to roll out fixes if they need to, they know that their containers, for instance, are being scanned from a security perspective every time they deploy them, they're actually able to build automated infrastructures that are more agile and more secure. So it's pretty exciting. So that involves automated change management. Absolutely. And data assurance. Talking about containers, that's interesting. Spinning up containers. You want to spin them down frequently, so the bad guys, it makes it harder for them to get through. You're talking about VM sprawling, right? Yeah, right. That's one of the containers sprawling, right? The biggest issues out there. And by the way, as you automate this infrastructure, rightly so you mentioned infrastructure as code, then you can do the other magic, which is introducing machine learning, artificial intelligence, and today, they get to learn such in Gupta, gave, and as Scott Harrell, they gave a terrific demonstration of finding real-cause analysis for very, very complex kind of problems that will take forever in the old-fashioned world. Now, all of a sudden, you have the management system, in this case, DNA center, that tells you actually what the problem is. And if you validate it, you click a button, and instantaneously you deploy new policies and configuration. That's a dream come true, literally. You may say probably we are the last ones to the party in terms of infrastructure players, the industry I mean. But we're getting there very quickly, and this is a whole new set of possibilities now. We talk on theCUBE a lot, and I think it's really relevant for what I'm hearing about your strategies, is cloud is about bringing the cloud operating model to your data, wherever your data lives. And that seems to be kind of underscore your strategy. Absolutely. And so edge, cloud, on-prem, hybrid, you guys, your strategy is really to enable customers to bring that operating model wherever they need to. Absolutely. Great. Yeah, data transparency is a big deal. I mean, application anywhere, eating data anywhere, that's the world where we're going to. Guys, thoughts, final thoughts on Cisco Live this year. I know it's only day one. Probably got some customer meetings tonight. But initial impressions, San Diego, cool voice. Well, it's always great to be in San Diego, and it's a great facility, and we know our customers really enjoy San Diego as well. I think we're going to have a great customer appreciation event on Wednesday night. But, you know, I was struck, you know, just after the keynote, I mean, the world of solutions was buzzing. I mean, there seems to be, there's always a lot of energy at Cisco Live, but somehow, so far, there seems to be maybe even a little bit more energy. I know we've got a number of announcements coming this week across a bunch of different areas, including cloud, so we're excited for the next few days. Well, you got the double whammy. The first half, we were in February, we were in Barcelona. You guys don't waste any time. You come right back in June. Your final thoughts, Fabio. Oh, it's just so exciting to speak with customers and partners over here, and you can touch their excitement. I mean, people love to come together and get all the news, you know, in one place. It's just a tremendous amount of energy here. All right, Kip Compton, Fabio Gorey, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for having us. You're welcome, all right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest, Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, Lisa Martin. We're live from Cisco Live in 2019 in San Diego. Right back.