 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE live in Orlando for Cisco Live 2018. Exclusive coverage, I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. It's two minimum all week for three days and we have Dave Vellante flying in as well co-host for a kickoff of day two of our three days of coverage. Great Dave, great to see you Stu. Good morning. So I think the big news, obviously day one in the books, Cisco Live pumping on all cylinders. The parties, we saw a great concert last night at the Cohesity party celebrating their 250 million in funding, but the real big news here is Cisco's moving up the stack and the business performance. Dave, you had a chance to scour the landscape last night and yesterday, what did you find out? What's going on with Cisco's business? Well, the business-wise, I mean, this company is actually doing quite well. It's a large company, $50 billion. They're growing at 4%. You don't usually see growth. We've seen how many quarters in a row as IBM revenues declined. Cisco's reversed that trend and is growing. The other thing about Cisco is it brought about $60 billion from overseas on the tax holiday, which is just amazing. The company's trying to shift its model more toward a cloud-like model. Stu, you've made the point many times. Cisco, like Dell, doesn't have a cloud. So they've got to create a cloud-like model. They've got to go multi-cloud. They've got to be an arms dealer for the cloud. So it's a company that's $50 billion, a $200 billion plus market value, which is down from where they were in the Halcyon days. But still, it's a 4x revenue multiple, and they throw off over $10 billion in free cash flow a year. So this company's very, very strong. And John, we were talking last night about the angle in security and basically a programmable network infrastructure. To me, the big trend is it's all about the data. As the data explodes, the network gets a lot of pressure on it. You know, Stu, I want to get your thoughts on this because we talked in security last night. You talk about companies that have to pivot. Cisco's not pivoting in any capacity. They're dealing with networks that are running the internet, right? So Chuck Robbins just said, look it, we have done a lot of great things, but they're dealing with so much security threats. It's encrypted traffic. They are dealing with a ton of activity. So the relevance of Cisco is on an all-time high. The opportunity is to take that relevance and build on top of it. And so we're looking for some signals, Stu. What do you, when you squint through the noise and look at Cisco's relevance, obviously you see they run networks. You're moving up the stack with Kubernetes and containers and DevNet's been a great indicator of the rise of the new normal. But they got to actually put it together. They got a community. Where's the change happening, Stu, in your opinion? Yeah, so John, first of all, I look at, we've been tracking Cisco's moves in open source for many years. Dave Wright, Lou Tucker, folks we've had on theCUBE. They're very involved in OpenStack. They're deeply involved, Kubernetes, Istio, that Diane Greene on stage. So there was that seed of growth and change, but it didn't really push far enough. Where the critique I've had for Cisco and many of the other big legacy companies is they haven't really embraced cloud as fast as they could. It's good to see where Cisco is and where they're trying to bring their ecosystem. The exciting stuff has been right here in the DevNet zone. How many events do we go to in companies we talk to? Oh, we need to be relevant to all these developers out there. Well, Susie and her team here, they've got a platform, they've got 500,000 developers on it. John, you and I interviewed one of the little startups, NetNology. Buddy of mine actually, Jason Edelman, worked for this other company called Network to Code. They've got this whole little incubator section here in the DevNet zone. These are hardcore networking people helping to bridge that gap between the network and the developer world. It's open APIs, it's all the things we've been talking about and that really does set the stage for Cisco to help not only itself, but it's very large channel and partner ecosystem move further into this new cloud-native world. I want to get your thoughts real quick. I know we've got to get in day two, but if you look at Cisco, they've done a lot of things early. The human network, they've had telepresence. So they've hit megatrends, but they've misfired on timing. The timing- IoT is another example. IoT, they misfire on timing. Again, they have the network to fall back on, which is a core asset and core competency. But if you look at the timing of what they're doing right now, as Pat Gelsinger would say, you get on the right wave. And what DevNet, to me, proves to your point is that Cisco's on the cloud-native wave and they have a clear visibility for their network engineers not to feel like they're not relevant and they have to retrain to learn how to code. What's important, and we talked about it yesterday, is that the network engineers are instrumental, powering, and they're the tier one people. Now with cloud-native, there's a path where they can extend their career, not pivot or reset. It's just becoming more powerful. So if you can be a network engineer and then code with cloud-native, you got the best of both worlds. The power base extends. It's not like, I need to be retrained, my job's going away. No, no, your job is expanding. This is what DevNet has tapped into. Would DevNet create your reaction? Well, when cloud exploded, everybody wanted infrastructure as code and to your point, Stu, I mean, you remember when IBM launched Bluemix, like, we need developers, Dell, HPE, Lenovo. These companies don't have a strong developer community. I mean, even Oracle kind of lost its way with developers. Here comes Cisco, allowing Cisco engineers to do infrastructure as code. It's a huge leverage. I mean, it's an amazing turn. Yeah, Oracle should take a playbook out of what Cisco's doing. Stu, your thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. It's, you know, there's a lot of training. And one of the strengths, actually, if you look at this community, it's about training. We talked about it in our open yesterday, John. When you walk in, there's this giant bookstore. People are excited. It's their career. And they've been here for the last five years up. You know, automation's going to kill your job. The machines are going to kill your job. They're jumping in and, you know, most of them, at least, are understanding that they need to adjust what they're doing, learn, move forward, and embrace some of these options out here. Well, and it's not just, you know, as we were talking earlier, it's not just learning Python as a generalist. It's applying it specifically to Cisco infrastructure and actually getting stuff done, moving from command line interfaces to, you know, a much more facile development environment, driving value through developer productivity and increasing value up the stack. Yeah, and then as Diane Greene said yesterday in the keynote from Google Next, from Google Cloud, is mind-blowing experiences. I think Cisco's in a great position. They got a lot of core things going on, position of strength. You know, can they execute? Can they secure that network security? Can they have that extensibility in the programmability of the network? I think it's core. I think DevNet's an indicator. And everything else will fall into place, in my opinion. So, you know, day two, Dave, thanks for joining us. Today we're going to have Dave on the day in theCUBE. Throughout the day, he's going to also go out and get some stories, wrapping it up here on the intro. Day two begins. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more for this short break.