 Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live, Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage and she's joined by Kostub Das, otherwise known as Katie, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and Katie, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you. All right, so let's start off Katie too. If you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start? How did it evolve? We'll get into it. Yeah, we've just had a terrific partnership and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. I mean Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology driven companies innovating. We're both also super programmatic companies. We do everything via API. It's very, very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. I mean, we're chasing kind of common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. So Katie, you have, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco. So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco. But here we are 2019. Cisco is a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. Tell me what it's like working with them and especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure. What it means to partner with them? Absolutely, you're right. So I worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career. And then went away for, I'd say a good 10 years and joined Pure in June. And I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I wouldn't even tell you, it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately but both together. I think that it's absolutely been very successful. And to Katie's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical. And I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. Makes it so much easy for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. So we always joke about Barney deals. I love you, you love me. I mean, it's clear you guys go much, much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together. Can we peel the onion on that one a little bit and talk about what you guys are doing? I'll start there and then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader, Francisco. But if you can think about the pace of this, the partnership I think is roughly three or so years old. We have 16 or 16 Cisco validated designs for a flash stack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So a huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers on both sides of the fence. Yeah, totally second that. You know, we started out with the, and Cisco validated designs are like blueprints. So we started out with the blueprints for the standard workloads, Oracle SAPN. We keep those fresh as newer versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late, right? So ACI, we talked, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of pure storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting. So we've got some CVDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling inner-site, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite with pure storage and pure storage ability to integrate into the inner-site APIs. We talked about it, in fact, we talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas, as well as some of these new spaces. Yeah, maybe we can unpack that inner-site piece a bit because people might look at it initially and say, okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, but is this just a networking tool? And we're working with someone with pure, okay, maybe explain a little bit the scope of how if I'm a pure administrator, how I live into this world. Yeah, no, absolutely. So let's start with what is inner-site? Just for a foundational thing. So inner-site is our server management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the BIOS settings, the VLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud. But it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question one asks is, now that we have this partnership, can it do the same thing for storage? Can it actually provision a LUN? Can it actually provision that storage? Get that up and running. And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple because all of your storage needed to do was to write to some of those inner-site APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. Yeah, and I'd agree with that. I think it'll even become more important as the companies start partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So as you probably saw earlier this year in February, or sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first kind of leaning into hybrid cloud. So that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So this you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to inner-site integration. And just to bounce on that, strategically you can see the alignment there as well. I mean Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now. We've done work to enable similar development environments, whether you're doing something on-prem or in the cloud so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other and then combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really, really compelling solution. And like you said, you've got pretty clear swim lanes for the two companies, there's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right? I mean you've got 25,000 engineers almost, but still you've got, you still have limited resources. But so what makes this one so special and why are you able to spend so much time and effort each of you? I can start. So from a pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned. You called it out there that there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where our core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company and just a lot of synergies in the market. Make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our kind of lean-in partner truthfully, I run all of the alliances up here and aligned share by my resources really our focus at that partnership. Yeah. And if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage company that are new, modern in a good way, right? A new modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco Compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we're kind of very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers and that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. We had a session earlier today and we went pretty deep into AI but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question there is what are customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine intelligence era? You want to go for it? I'll go for it. This is a really exciting space and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself. We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCSC4ATML. Highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth but it needs something to feed it the data and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just like custom made for each other. Anything to add? Yeah, absolutely, I'd agree with that. Really if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful and first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be and I will tell you most of them are, is how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product and then you take look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object and file, really to make that useful so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. The tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run, all the Kafka's and the cafes and the TensorFlow's and the Python's, it's not just confined to data scientists anymore, it's really starting to seep throughout the organization. Is there anything there? Yeah, so what's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around and that leads to businesses and the leaders of the businesses saying, we've got to have an AI strategy, we've got to hire these data scientists but at the same time the data scientists can get started on their laptop, they can get started in the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work and you've got to have something that's built on these components so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the IT teams so that the data scientists when they build their beautiful models have a place to deploy and have a place to put that into production and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing? What's the vision? Give us a little roadmap for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure to, for the traditional workloads. I mean, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side. I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on the inner side with the automation that we are supporting to bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And a third vector is going to be powering these new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics-type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to power those. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, would you add something? Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say, again, more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs. And AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really the step that Cisco's made is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on-prem together to really enable the multi-cloud? Great, all right, well, Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. Great, thanks for having us. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from Cisco, live Barcelona, right back.