 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Everyone, welcome back everyone. It's CUBE's live coverage from Barcelona, Spain. We're here for Cisco Live 2020, it's theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier with myself. Coast, do a minute, man. This has been four days of coverage. We've got another day tomorrow. A lot of action around application developers and programmable infrastructure. And really at the heart of this is hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, which is the future of where the enterprises are going. And really at the center of it is the suppliers and cloud service providers, obviously Cisco Power. They've got two great guests. I'm CUBE alumni, David Cope, senior director of cloud business development, Cisco. I'm Benjamin LaPlaine. Amy, a chief product officer of 3DS, outscale. Guys, welcome back. Good to see you again. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Benjamin, we talked two years ago here. I think it was what the early days when we started publicly riffing on the notion of cloud service providers going to start to be really more instrumental in how enterprises will deploy and manage workloads and applications. So we were right. Yeah. It turns out we were right. And we went actually even further than that. Is, so now outscale is not only a public cloud provider, or now we also have an on-frame solution so we can deploy our stacks on your frame with hardware, software, and services. And we actually start building locally compliant stacks. So in France, we actually got the second cloud certification for the French government. And we are also working for the HITAR and Freedom certification for the US. Great. Take a minute to give an update on the business you just had and acquisition. You're now part of a different company. Explain that and the relationship to the bigger company. So outscale was actually founded in 2010. And we actually started to provide for big cloud services starting in 2002 or something like this. And the outscale system was always one of our big customers. They were actually transforming themselves from being a software vendor to a software-as-a-service company, which is a huge move for a company this size. And we are actually supporting them going this direction. And they felt that they needed to have an internal support for cloud services within the group. So we are actually part of the family now. So congratulations. But I think this trust on the larger trend. David, we talked about how cloud services are going to be merging as more of a focal point. The global system integrates are already doing it. This is a tell sign for how large enterprises are going to start to be thinking. They need people to support them with their own stacks, their own in-house teams supporting these new workloads. What's your thoughts on this? Well, I think these guys are a great example of the evolution we've seen with the cloud. I think EC2 came out of beta in 2008 or something like that. And since then we've seen cloud go through sort of skepticism, experimentation, debate about private versus public. But today, I think both desires and also tools have enabled companies to start focusing just on their business and realize now they can place and manage workloads wherever their business priorities drive them, not IT constraints. And so you can get the best of both worlds. You can support this agility. And yet you can also start to manage governance and policies across these very different private and public environments. Benjamin, can you bring us a little bit inside your really hybrid solution you're helping with customers? We've had many years looking at this. You've seen some providers say, oh, we're going to help put a stack on your environment. But if you let IT touch it, oh, well I need to adjust something or make a change. And then if you're helping manage it, oh wait, you're out of compliance, you've done something different. From an application standpoint, we have seen, I might have my monolith in my data center, I have microservices in the public cloud, or in your service provider, it makes sense to do that. But help us understand kind of what goes where, who manages what, and what's really happening for your customers. So we try to come in with a very simple approach where basically the perimeter of responsibility is the same everywhere you go. So whether you're on-prem or in public cloud, you should still focus on your application and your area of expertise as a company and being able to deliver to your customers. And so we just want to make sure that for our customers, it's very easy to say, okay, it's not because I'm on-prem, then I need to do IT jobs, I'm still in need to manage applications. And since ours is actually providing both public cloud and on-prem solution, we want to provide it with as much isolation as possible. And that's one of the reasons why Oskar actually was integrated with the Cisco Cloud Center, so we can actually leverage the governance across the board, the homogeneity of application deployment, wherever you are. And it's exactly the same thing for the customer. You don't have to sacrifice anything because you're on-prem or you're on the public cloud. So what's specific about Cisco is driving that because you said a couple things that got my attention. One is you're providing a platform so the apps can work anywhere. I heard you kind of tease that. Is that one of the things that Cisco's bringing to the table? What's the Cisco value there? For me, it's been like 40 years that Cisco is around and it always works to actually bring bridges between platforms, between solutions, between companies. And I feel that's exactly why we're actually using the solution. So it's different bridge. It's not a network bridge for this one. It's more an application bridge, I would say a pipeline application bridge. And that's where we actually find the value for us. I want to get your thoughts real quick. Go off of the tangent a little bit on the operating model of cloud because we were riffing on this two years ago. This is now the big conversation here. Hybrid really is all about having that operating model whether it's on public or on-premises. How do you guys serving your customers when you have an app? Hey, I got an app. I just want to build my app. I don't care where it is. And I have my operation going to be seamless across. How are you implementing that? To be honest, I don't feel like we are not there yet. I feel companies still struggle to actually build an app, being able to deploy whatever the tenants they choose, whether it's going to be a public cloud provider or an American one, an European one, or even a Chinese one now, or on-prem. And since the stacks are always different, they always have to pay for the difference within this platform on their side. And I feel like the tools are actually helping these companies. So it's not actually the cloud providers making the effort. It's usually the tools and the ecosystem around these providers actually providing more tools and more solutions. So it's easier for the companies that actually manage the application at the end. David, maybe you can help us dig in a little bit to the management and the software that Cisco's working on and delivering here to help with these type of environments. Yeah, you know, the way I look at the world is, businesses have applications. Applications run on infrastructure. And the state of the industry today is, you should no longer care about where that application is running. It's just infrastructure. It's in my data center. It's in somebody else's data center called a cloud. So the state of the business today is, how do I create sort of a declarative model which describes my application independent of having to know the nuances of each of the endpoints and then be able to manage the entire lifecycle from optimizing costs, performance, placement, and then the ongoing policy-based governance. And for us, that management platform is Cloud Center, which is a cloud management platform. There's others in the industry that take a similar approach, but that really is where this blurring of data centers and clouds supporting any apps is occurring. What's some of the workloads that you guys are working on? Give some anecdotal feedback on some of the day-to-day things you're working on. Is it on-premise driving the action? Is it the app developers, your customers? You're serving multiple, a big company, right? Yeah, from what I've seen is we have had a lot of traction on on-prem solution because historically, it's been usual stacks which are usually lack of usability for the customers. They are now used to the public cloud, the features, the capabilities, the agility, and then when you're going back on-prem, you feel like you're traveling time backwards. And that's usually an issue. With our solution, where we don't change the level of responsibility of the customer, so it doesn't have to have data center people or operation people, it's still the same guys that we're actually working into the public cloud and they're going to operate exactly the same way on-prem. So that's a huge promise for these companies. And you're implementing that right now. Yeah, yeah, actually. Great. We deployed one beginning of this year, two last year, and it's going to continue to grow, specifically with the desktop system company as a business for them. So I got to ask you as an expert, the Nirvana, the Holy Grail or whatever word we want to use is to have applications just completely have programmable infrastructure. That's the DevOps, you know, Holy Grail. We're getting there. Where are we in your mind? How far do we have to go to get the app developers just coding away the progress of innovation? What's your thoughts on where the industry is and what we're dealing with here? I think you can already do it if you sacrifice a part of your freedom or a part of your portability. We can find tools that are actually working pretty well which is with each other. But once you're in, you're going to be in for at once. The issue is more, how it's going to become a more standardized way to actually work for both company. And that means also for us providers to provide kind of a same level of interface and the same way to work. So the company and I mean, so a part for a cloud center like the application are actually being able to work across infrastructure platforms, whatever they are. I mean, cloud center for the cross-platform work. Yeah, so cloud center is one of these tools that actually kind of leverage different platforms and don't really care. And as a user, you don't really care about the difference you can deploy whether it's going to be on VMware or on public cloud and you don't expect the same level of capability in terms of infrastructure. But still, you still deploy exactly the same pipelines or some workloads exactly the same way. What way to think about it, whether it's diso managing all of its operating divisions or whether it's IT ops trying to manage its developers is there's this sort of natural, some usually unspoken tension where IT ops wants to support the agility that developers are looking for and business units are looking for. But at the same time, IT ops is torn because they have to ensure governance and security and all that. So today, I think with these new platforms, you do a little bit of judo, frankly, is you allow developers or operating units to use the environment or tools of choice, but you still have these new cloud management platforms that allow you to apply and enforce governance. And those policies can either be exposed to them or it can be hidden from them. You got to choose. Well, that's the choice is key and the policy means automation. When you get the policies nailed down to business logic and automation. Exactly. Which is even better. I'm psyched to see more of that. But I got to ask you guys, I stopped at your Cisco booth, your multi-cloud booths. By the way, I love the demos over there. You get all the Cisco servers to provide everything else, but you guys got a multi-cloud section. Of course, there's a lot of Kubernetes being discussed there. So Benjamin, I got to get your take on this because Stu and I always joke, the joke is just throw containers around and you can do anything. You're dealing with a lot of on-premises legacy and enterprise stuff. Kubernetes and as service measures come down the pike and microservices, that seems to be really a great way to deal with it. How are you looking at that? What's your vision and how, what are some of the practitioner tools that are out there, what's your view on that? For me, the appeal of Kubernetes for the customers is less a way to work than the fact that it actually is a standout. So we are talking about the fact that wherever you are, you're always having different API calls, different way to authenticate yourself, different policy management. And I feel that the appeal of Kubernetes is that you can use it over any cloud platform in the world and it's always feel the same, it always behave the same way. And it's kind of the promise, the same promise that you can get with containers, but you get it on the orchestration layer of these containers. And I feel that's why people are quite rushing into it is because they feel that if it doesn't work there, then it might work somewhere else. So- How are you dealing with some of these enterprise applications? What do you guys do? So the interest for RSC, so we provide the control plane or the masternodes and usually customers, we still manage the resources or the resource pool on which they're going to deploy containers and whatever. We still manage mostly VMs and block storage, so the basic breaks of any infrastructure as a service provider. And the customers start from there and actually build an application and they can even reuse things that have been done somewhere else in any other cloud platform. David, talk about the Cisco vision here because I think you guys have been seeing this now. Obviously multi-cloud is kind of a future state. Obviously everyone has multi-clouds now, but hybrid is where the action is. And by getting this common operating model with you've got these Kubernetes trends and things going down the pipe with microservices, that really is impacting the momentum. How do you guys see that and what's your position on this? No, I think you're right. I mean, when you look at Kubernetes specifically, I think it's obviously maturing from just developer centric activities now into production. Most Kubernetes to date has been deployed on-prem or in the cloud, but now that's the foundation that's going to enable the future of hybrid workloads. Where I can start, again, blurring the boundaries between data centers and clouds, develop on the cloud, prod on-prem, develop on-prem, access to service on the cloud. So we're just starting to see sort of these hybrid Kubernetes workflows. And Cisco has a container platform that's native Kubernetes, but we've also, it runs on-prem, but it's also optimized to work with public clouds that support Kubernetes. And so it really becomes a single environment, a pool of resources for the application. I think it sets the table nicely for the app developers of the future, because at the end of the day, soon it's just develop your app and let things go and happen. Benjamin, final question while you're here, I want to get your expert opinion on this because I want to kind of go back to our 2018 and modernize our chat a little bit around cloud service providers. Because I think this is still going to be the hottest area because I think you're unique. You got acquired and you're still servicing a big customer base, but you're now part of the mothership, I guess, which is good, you got a lot of work to do. But cloud service providers will still service a lot of customers. And this is going to be a fast-growing market. What's your advice for other cloud service providers out there that are really trying to understand how do I build my infrastructure? How do I deal with the clouds? Do I just go all in on one? Do I build my own? How do I service the on-premises? What's your advice? I think like, if your company, main area of expertise is not IT, you shouldn't actually invest in house ITs. I think nowadays, we have like, and I'm not talking only about our scale, but we have like a lot of different solutions, a lot of technological partners, such as Cisco and NetApp, that have a great solution that's actually proven. There is solution as also at scale. So I feel like anything that you would try to veer from the ground would have a huge disadvantage in terms of time of technology. And again, for any other cloud provider, I think also we're going to see the separation we're talking about in 2018 is still going to continue to exist. And I think it's going to even increase where we're going to see local compliance, our regulation actually for the past two years dramatically increased in terms of strengths and numbers. And I feel like the approach of multi-local cloud as we've been pushing for the past 10 years within house care, it makes even more sense. Do you see specialty clouds emerging fast or building on, say, Amazon, Google, or other clouds? Or what do you see? To be honest, I even think that the big three in the US are even starting to find their own place, which is not the same. And I feel we're going to see the same thing with the Chinese and reopen actors as well. Awesome. Benjamin, great to have you on. Great to have your insight from the field. Appreciate it. David, thanks for coming on. Appreciate that insight from Cisco as well. It's theCUBE coverage day. Three of our four days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage from Barcelona after this short break.