 Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Big Data New York City 2016. Brought to you by headline sponsors, Cisco, IBM, NVIDIA, and our ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. We're back, welcome to theCUBE. This is the Big Data New York City, Big Data NYC production. theCUBE is the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Bill Shields is here at high tech bill, senior marketing manager at Cisco. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, appreciate your time. So I like the Twitter handle. I was amazed it was still open. I was a little late to the game and you're trying to think of what to do, and it was just there, and I was like, wow, I own the domain name now too. As I'm saying, it's like you have the URL, because the URLs are hard, right? You're searching, oh, it's taking, taking, taking. Every now and then, you get lightning in the bottle. Yeah, get lucky. Well, anyway, welcome. Thank you. So talk about your role at Cisco. So I'm a senior marketing manager, and one of the things I've focused on for the past six years is the TCO of our solutions. And how we're different than the other guys, and why customers should care about those differences. There are differences, and it really does matter. And so I've done a lot of work with different account teams. I read a lot of customer case studies, and just try and find out what the customer is saying is different about UCS and why it matters. Well, you know, again, I fell on my sword this morning when we were talking about my prediction when Cisco got into the server market, which it really didn't get into the server market, but I said, I'll forget it. This is fish out of water. But what you did was you attacked the TCO problem, because IT is such a labor-intensive problem, or such a labor-intensive industry, and we've predicted at Wikibon that a couple hundred billion dollars is gonna come out of IT labor and non-differentiate and stuff. And that really is the part of TCO that you attacked, isn't it? Exactly. I mean, both Gartner and IDC agree the big spend of the data center is not your cat-back to duropics. And that's what we saw. I mean, Sean was just talking about that. Reading my customer case studies and looking at that, customers say we deploy 83% faster and can save 62% on their ongoing administration cost. And that's just you and me talking about that Sean was saying data clusters keep growing and growing and growing and how do you provision them? It's faster time to value for your hardware, which means you get it in production quicker, which means it starts adding value quicker and it takes less IT labor to do that. And that's really critical is you want those valuable IT resources that aren't cheap to be doing value-added work, not racking and stacking and worrying about break-thick stuff. You want them to be doing value-added things. And the timing was actually very good because I remember we made the observation back then that, because it came around as, you know, the whole hyperscale movement, the big cloud guys, the Amazon and Google, Azure really wasn't as prominent back then. But anyway, the observation was that those big hyperscale guys, they would spend engineering time to save money, but the enterprise, they didn't have that resource. They would spend money to save time. And as you guys hit that perfectly, do you sort of buy that sort of difference in philosophy? Well, I don't buy the idea that cloud's cheaper. Let me just throw that out there and be controversial. I've done different works on that. And it's one of those things is, yes, you have flexibility, but we still in like Cisco Capital, we have some flexibility pricing there. I've been looking at storage, especially because of this conference and Sean was talking about our C3260 Dent Storage Server. And when I look at that, I could actually, you know, just interesting things versus Amazon S3. We're saving those for another month. If I can't give you the real juicy bits, but if you join us for our Worldwide Partner Conference, you'll know what I'm talking about. And so I think that you don't necessarily have to spend money on OPEX. If you have the right engineers in there with our automation, whether it's, you know, for a few servers with UCS manager who was talking about more global, UCS central, UCS director, you can actually do a lot of interesting things to automation with a few people and you don't have to spend a huge amount of money on your IT people for just racking and stacking and troubleshooting. Yeah, and the point I was making is, you know, if you go to Amazon and say, hey, buy my converged infrastructure, think, we got this, we got a bunch of engineers, we're gonna build our own, stick stuff together and however they do it. But the enterprise just doesn't have those resources and or if they do, they wanna put them somewhere else. So they'll, they see value in being able to reduce the labor component of their TCO. And you're still gonna have labor even if you're in Amazon. You're still gonna have CIS admins. You still have to manage all that stuff as if you don't own the infrastructure anymore. So, you know, one might argue that you maybe are a little bit less IT management heavy if you go to the cloud because you don't worry about the break fix people but you still have your people who have to know your infrastructure, have to manage it. You're never gonna get rid of those people regardless of if it's on-prem or in the cloud. Well, the cloud, you're not gonna get a debate here that the cloud is more expensive. But, you know, just look at it, the AM AWS is operating margins, it's 20, 25%. I don't know if Cisco is off the top of my head. I know EMCs is probably in the mid-teens and EMCs are very profitable company. Well, it used to be, now it's Dell. But, so we'll see, but the point being that it's very, very, it's not a race to the bottom. These guys are making lots and lots of money. All right, let's talk about automation. So you're making the case that you still gotta manage it. My inference is that part of the reason that Amazon is so profitable is because they're driving automation. Can you replicate that level of automation in the data center? We can, so our claim to fame is UCS Manager and the thing called a service profile. And if you think of it, it's basically like the SIM card for your cell phone. That's your cell phone's identity. If you drop your phone here, cracks the screen, all you gotta do is walk into an AT&T of a Verizon store and you get a new SIM card, new phone, put your old SIM card in it and your phone number doesn't change. You get text messages. We have that same idea for the server. And that's what makes us the best server company in the world is I think called a service profile. It's a very simple concept. No one's still been able to match it. Our competitors are still trying, but that allows you to basically make a change, one place like Sean was saying, and you can blow it out to hundreds, thousands of servers. I mean, I give a little presentation in the booth talking about what if you need to add a VLAN to a thousand servers? How do you accomplish that? Well, Cisco, it's really simple. You go to one spot, you add the VLAN, it replicates out. You don't have to go do it a thousand times. That's what we're talking about when we're trying to free those IT resources to do something then adding to VLAN. That's just ridiculous. I've spent hundreds of man hours to add one VLAN. That's CLI. Yeah, exactly. All right, okay. So that's a good example. Now talk about as we sort of attack this IT labor problem, how are organizations sort of shifting the attention to other value added areas? Where are they adding value? Do they have to reskill? What are you seeing there? So it's really a matter of they've already had high skilled resources. So the County Fire Authority in Melbourne, Australia is one of the examples I use, is they've actually stated that they are now adding value to their citizens by taking those people who are keeping the lights on. They no longer have to worry about keeping the lights on. Now they're actually doing value added IT. So I think most organizations have people that are already skilled. They just can't use them effectively because they're trapped in a world of racking and stacking and doing break fix work because they just don't have the ability to get away from that with Cisco they can. For years people were so afraid, oh we don't want to talk about the IT labor piece because that implies people are going to get fired but people aren't losing their jobs over this to your point. That's exactly what I tell you. We're not trying to put assist admin out of a job. We're trying to let you go do something more creative, more fun, more interesting, adding value to the business. You're no longer going to be a cost center. You can actually be a profit center. That's what this is all about one from my perspective with IT labor and Cisco. I mean, LUN management as a career is probably not the direction that you want to try to sustain. And then when you hear about all this dev ops stuff or sometimes we call it ops dev, this notion of infrastructure as code. What are you seeing there? How is Cisco sort of supporting that trend? Also we have Chef, Ansible, Puppet, all that stuff but the thing is we I think were very early to the game because we had an open API from the get go. It wasn't an afterthought. That was actually what they created first with Cisco UCS. What's thinking about how are we gonna do the whole server management piece, the server configuration piece and did that with an open API from the very beginning. So that allows you to plug us into any tool out there that can talk to an API. It can talk to our stuff. So one of the things to say, we're not trying to force you to do things differently. If you have someone else's management tool, chances are we already interoperate with. If you want to get the shiny new thing called dev ops, well, chances are we can interoperate that. I know we can because it was all built on an open API from the get go, not an afterthought. Well, how would you summarize Cisco's cloud strategy? Help us understand that. I'm the wrong person to ask about that. But is it fair to say that you're basically trying to help customers replicate what the public cloud is doing on-prem? I think we believe in a hybrid cloud model from my personal opinion. I'm not speaking for Cisco here but our whole thing is allowing you to choose what model meets best. And so we think there are things that belong on-prem, whether it's data sovereignty, regulation, things like that that need to be on-prem. One of the great quotes I have a friend of mine who works in the service provider space is own the base, rent the spike. And so we don't think the public cloud's going away. We think there is a use for it there. And so we have this hybrid cloud model. One of things that is relatively new to Cisco's application called Clicker, now Cisco Cloud Center, that whole idea behind that particular product is to free you from the decision of whether it should be your own private internal cloud in-house or whether it should be on Amazon, Azure, Google, wherever, it allows you to actually take a look at the various cloud offerings and decide which of these providers, whether it's my own internal cloud or the public cloud meets the best application need and be able to move these workflows around seamlessly. It's a really, really cool product and anyone thinking about cloud, even if they're not a Cisco hardware customer, ought to come check that out just from their cloud strategy because it allows you to move things seamlessly around in the public cloud. Well, here at Big Data Week, Big Data NYC, Strata Plus, how are the workloads here? How's the discussion different than what you might find in a traditional enterprise, a VM world or Cisco live? How's the conversation different here? Really, it's about scale, like Sean was saying. It's because data doesn't get smaller, it just keeps getting bigger. And so most of the thing here is all about scale. When you're talking about a VM farm or an exchange farm or something like that, those are generally fairly static. It's a project of a fixed size, well-known, not going to grow, but with Big Data, data just keeps on growing bigger and bigger and bigger. And so we're talking more scale here. So customers, when they install your systems, they're, I guess we talked about attacking their labor, non-differentiated labor challenges, what are they asking you for next? What's on your to-do list? More of the same, just keep making it better. That's one of the things that surprised me. So I said, my previous employer worked a lot of trade shows and I was used to being yelled at by customers at trade shows. What do you mean, unhappy customers? I have yet to have a customer come up to me in any of the myriad of trade shows I've worked for Cisco in the past several years. I've never met anyone that was unhappy with our products. And that to me is somewhat surprising in a certain sense because we always have problems. Just, it happens. But to have every single customer that I've ever met at a trade show always saying how great the products are, that to me is just so reaffirming that I know I'm at the right place with the right products at the right time. That to me is just amazing. So what are some of the other things you've seen in the industry except when you talk to customers and some of the big trends that you see that are exciting to you, Bill? Well, of course, our new HyperFlex system, our new hyper-converged infrastructure. The big thing there for me is here again, we're doing things differently than the other guys. We didn't consider networking optional for that. So I thought we'd, Bill? Explain that some more. Okay, give us a Cisco's perspective on the change in the game with hyper-converged. Because the majority of hyper-converged vendors, they're selling you a box. They're not selling you a solution. Networking, you have to figure out what the networking needs to be there. Whether or not you get that configured right. You know, is it one gig, 10 gig, 40 gig, what do you need there? Whereas we're providing an entire solution. We have the compute piece of it. We have the networking piece of it. Just what that networking is just the same as everything classic UCS brings to the table. It's the same UCS manager, that same tool. So you can manage your hyper-converged solution just like you manage all the rest of your infrastructure. You don't have separate processes or procedures or tools just because your workload changes. To me, that's not the best thing about Cisco is it's the same tool regardless of your workload, regardless of your form factor. And that's interesting. So you're right, the hyper-converged guys are really, they're, I mean, storage companies in a way. And the networking is okay, we gotta figure that out to your point. From a storage standpoint, your hyper-converged is use the storage that's on the server. Correct, just like everybody else. But the thing that we also offer that other people don't is here again being able to add compute only nodes in a hyper-converged model. So we have the standard one RU2, RU rack servers for our storage and compute. But what if you just need compute and not storage? We're the only guys that allows you to also add compute to that hyper-converged cluster. You boot the hyper-visor off an SD card, you're using diskless blades that can attach to the storage and now I can grow my compute without growing my storage. If you need both, we can offer you both. Another one RU2, RU box. But that's another reason we're different from the other guys is that disaggregation of storage and compute even at the hyper-converged level. Because you guys came out with a blank sheet of paper, right, you didn't have kind of the legacy business, the exact same way we came out from UCS is we had a blank sheet of paper. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've been doing this a long time and I've been around since we were just tower servers as all there was available. Back to the old system pro-days, if you remember the compact and those things. So there's nothing wrong with the way the other guys are doing it and nothing wrong at all but when you have a blank sheet of paper and you have no legacy baggage, you can look at things differently and decide there's a better way to do this and just go out and do that instead of worrying about all the legacy stuff that we have to bring along with you. And that scaling of compute independent of storage is big in the big data world, right? Because as you're saying, data's growing so fast, you can't predict how fast it's growing. We were talking to Sean about that as well and even if it works today in six months, forget it. You're going to need either more storage or more compute and not necessarily in the same linear fashion, right? So, okay, I'll give you a last word on bumper sticker of your choice. Cisco, big data, the future of infrastructure. So, to me, it's Cisco. Cisco does things differently. Those differences matter. Come see us here at the booth at the end of the day. Find someone from Cisco to talk to or your partner because we do do things differently and there's differences matter. All right, Bill, at high tech, Bill, HIGH tech, Bill. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, appreciate it. You're welcome. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest at theCUBE. We're live from Big Data NYC, right back.