 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2020, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live 2020 here in Barcelona, our third year of the show, over 17,000 in attendance between the Cisco people, their large partner ecosystem and the customers. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for this segment is Dave Vellante. John Furrier is scouring the show for all of the news at the event and joining us, we have two first time guests on the program, first sitting by left is Patrick Smith, who is the field TTO for AMIA with Pure Storage. Sitting to his left is Eric Graffier, who is the managing director of MEAR, specialist with Cisco. So you have a slightly larger region than Patrick does. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks a lot. All right, so we know the show, we were talking that broad ecosystem and of course Cisco in the data center group has very strong storage partnerships highlighted by their converged infrastructure stacks. I wrote my research many, many years ago. Cisco's brilliant job was, when they entered the server market, they made sure that fragmented storage ecosystem, they made partnerships across the board. And of course, when Pure's ascendancy with the flash era made the stack, so helping to paint those data centers orange with your Cisco partnership. So Patrick, gives the update here, 2020, what's interesting and important to know about Pure Storage and Cisco customer base? You know, we continue to see significant adoption of flash stack, our converged infrastructure with Cisco, driving just great interest and great growth, both for Pure and for Cisco with the UCS platform and the value that the customers see in flash stack, bringing together storage, networking and compute together with overall automation of the stack. And that really gives customers fantastic time to value. And that's what they're looking for in this day and age. All right, and Eric, what differentiates the partnership with Pure versus, as you said, we do work with many of the storage companies out there. Well, so we had a baby together, you know, it was called flash stack and it was couple of years ago now and as you said, I think the key element for us is really to have those CVDs, those Cisco validity designs together. And flash stack was a great addition to our existing partnership at that time, you know, I'm talking about couple of years ago and of course with the flash technology of Pure, we've seen the demand, I would say growing and growing and it has been amazing, amazing trajectory together. Talk a little bit more about the CVDs, the different use cases that you're seeing go through all 20, but maybe a couple of your favorite children. Well, just to make sure that people understand what CVD means, you know, it's Cisco validated design. This is kind of an outcome in the form of a document which is available for customers and partners which is the outcome of the partnership from R&D to R&D, which is just telling customers and partners what they need to order and how they need to fit all of this together for a specific business outcome. And the reason why we have multiple CVDs is we have one CVD per use case. So the more use cases we have together, the more the CVD is precise and you just have to follow the CVD design principles. Of course, the latest ones, and maybe Patrick, you can say a word, but we've been of course doing things regarding analytics and AI because this is a big demand right now. So maybe Patrick, you want to say a word on this. Yeah, you guys were first with AI and bringing AI and storage together with your partnership with NVIDIA, so maybe you can come down on that. The FlashBlade was our move into building a storage platform for AI and modern analytics and we've seen tremendous success with that in lots of different verticals. And so with Cisco, we launched FlashStack for AI which brings together FlashBlade networking and Cisco's fantastic compute platform with capability for considerable scale of NVIDIA GPUs. So an inner box capability to really deliver fast time to market solutions for the growing world of analytics and modern AI. People want quick insight into the vast amounts of data we have. And so FlashStack for AI is really important for us being able to deliver as part of the Cisco ecosystem and provide customers with a platform for success. What's happening with modernization generally but specifically in Europe? Obviously Cisco, long history in Europe, pure you got a presence here, good presence but obviously much newer, larger proportion, far larger proportions in North America. So it's a real opportunity for you guys. What are you seeing in terms of modernization of infrastructure and apps in the European community? Modernization I think is particularly important and it's more and more seen under the guise of digital transformation because investing in infrastructure just doesn't get the credit that sometimes it deserves. But the big push there is really all around simpler infrastructure, easier management and the push for automation. Organizations don't want to have large infrastructure support teams who are either installing or managing in a heavy touch way. They're environments and so the push towards automation not just at the infrastructure layer but all the way up the stack is really key. And we were talking earlier behind us we have the DevNet sessions here all about how customers of Cisco and by correlation of pure can really optimize the management of their environment, use technology like inter-site, like Ansible and others to really minimize the overhead of managing technology, deliver services faster to customers and be more agile in this always-on world that we live in. There's no time to really add a human to the cycle of managing infrastructure. Well I think we've been very proud over the years because this notion of converging infrastructure which was the promise was to simplify and modernize the data centers before it was like everything needs to get connected to anything and coming with this notion of a pod everything converge, we've done the job for you Mr. Customer just think about adding some pod. This has been the promise for the last 10 years and we've been very proud almost to have created this market but it would have been possible without the partnership with the storage players and with Pure we've been one step further in terms of simplifying things for customers. Yeah but I love the extension you're talking about because absolutely converged infrastructure was supposed to deliver on that simplicity and it was let's think of the entire rack as a unit of how we manage it but with today's applications with the speed of change happening in the environment we've gone beyond human speed and so therefore if we don't have the automation that you were talking about we can't keep up with what the business needs to be able to do there. Yeah that's what it's all about. It's you know the rapid rate of change you know whether it's business services or whether it's supporting developers and the developer environments you know more and more our customers are becoming software development organizations their developers are a key resource and making them as efficient as possible is really important so being able to quickly spin up development environments new environments for developers you know using snapshot technology giving them the latest sets of data to test their applications on is really central to enabling and empowering the developer. You know you talk about Cisco's play and kind of creation of the converged infrastructure of Mark and I think that's fair by the way others may claim it but I think the mantle goes to you but there were two friction points or headwinds that we pointed out early in the days the first was organizational and the servers team, the storage team, the network team didn't speak together and the practitioner told us one day look it you want to solve that problem put it in and watch what happens because if you try to figure out the organization then you'll never get there and that sort of took care of itself the other was the channel the channel likes things separate they can add value they have the sort of box selling mentality so I wonder if you could update us on what the mindset is in the channel and how that's evolved. Yeah it's a great question I think the channel actually really likes the simplicity of a converged infrastructure to sell it's a very simple message and it really empowers the channel to take to your point about organization they have the full stack all in one sellable item and so they don't have to fight for the different components it's one consistent unit that they sell as a whole and so I think it simplifies the channel and actually we find that customers are actively seeking out you know it's shown by our growth with FlashStack that customers are actually seeking out the channel partners who are selling FlashStack Yeah don't you think the channel realize wow we really do have to go up the stack add more value do things like partner with the devs For most of the partners they were heavily specialized on storage or compute or network so for most of them supporting the converged infrastructure was to be able to put a foot you know into another market which was an expansion for them which was point number one Point number two maybe the things that we've been missing because since the beginning we had APIs around all those platforms I don't believe you know in the early days I'm talking about five years from now that they got that they could really really build something upon the converged infrastructure now if you go through the DevNet area here you know at Cisco Live you will see that I think this is the time now for them to understand and really build new services on top of it so I believe the value for the channel is pretty obvious now more than ever it's a great point you don't usually hear converged infrastructure and infrastructure is code in the same conversation but the maturation of the platforms underneath are bringing things together they really are in the same way that IT organizations are freeing up more time to focus up the stack on automation and added value the same is true of the partners it's interesting the corollary between the two so I have a question on your act too so what got us here the last 10 years both firms were disruptors Cisco came in and disrupted the compute space it was misunderstood Cisco getting into servers that'll never work well really not getting into servers we're changing the game ah okay 10 years later you're very disappointed Pure all Flash really created some havoc in the industry injected a ton of Flash into the data center frankly drove a truck through the legacy business okay so very successful what's act two for you guys what do you envision you know disruptors you sort of you know more incrementalist I'd love to hear your thoughts on that I start Patrick you go first probably for us phase two is what you heard yesterday morning I think Liz Santoni did a great speech regarding Cisco inter-site workload optimizer sorry you know for the name this is a bit long but what it means is now we truly connect the infrastructure to the application performance and the fact that we can place and discuss about converse infrastructure but in the context of what truly matters for customers which is application this is the first time ever you're going to see such amount of R&D put into bringing the two worlds together so this is just the beginning you know but I think this was probably for me yesterday one of the most important announcement ever and by the way Pure is coming with this announcement so if you as a customer buy Cisco inter-site workload optimizer you'll get everything you need to know about Pure and if you have to move things around the storage area you know the tool will be doing it for you so we are really the two of us you know in this announcement so Patrick if you want to no I mean as Eric mentioned inter-site is important for Cisco it's important for us we're very proud to be early integrators as a third party into inter-site to allow that simple management but you know as you talk about the future we were viewed as disruptors when we first came to market with FlashArray and we consider still as ourselves to be disruptors and innovators and you know the amount of our revenue that we invest in innovation in what is a really focused product portfolio I think is showing benefits and you know you've seen the announcements over the last six months or so with FlashArray C bringing all the benefits of Flash to tier two applications and just the interest that that has generated is is is huge you know in the world of networking with NVMe of a fabric and Rocky V2 just increasing the performance for business applications that you know will have fantastic implications for things like SAP time time and performance critical databases and then what we announced with Direct Memory with with adding SCM as a read cache onto FlashArray as well you know really giving customers investment protection for what they bought from us already because you know they can as you well know Evergreen gives customers an asset that continues to appreciate in value which is completely the opposite and you're both sort of embracing that service consumption model I mean Cisco becoming a very large proportion of your business you guys have announced actually straight cloud plays you've built an array inside of AWS which is pretty innovative so yes and as well as the cloud play with with cloud block store in AWS there's pure as a service which takes that cloud like consumption model and allows the customer to run it in their own data center without owning the assets and that that's really interesting because customers have got used to the cloud like consumption model and paying as an OPEX rather than CAPEX and so bringing that into their own facility and only paying for the data you have written really does change the game in terms of how they consume and think about their storage environments Patrick we'd just love to get your viewpoint you're talking a lot of customers this week you said you've been checking out the DevNet zone for people that didn't make it to the show here what have they been missing what would their peers be telling them in the hallway conversations you know there's a huge amount as we've been talking about there's a huge amount on automation and actually we see it as we go into customers the number of people we're now talking to who are developers but not developers developing business applications but developers developing code for managing infrastructure is key and you see it all around the DevNet zone and then the focus on containers you know I've been talking about it for a long time and containers is so important for enterprises going forward we have a great play in that space and I think as we roll forward the next three to five years containers is just going to be the important technology that will be prevalent across enterprises large and small yeah we agree Eric and Patrick thank you so much for giving us the update congratulations on all the progress and definitely look forward to keeping an eye on you guys thank you very much alright Dave Vellante and I will be back with much more here from Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona thanks for watching theCUBE