>> Live from San Francisco,
it's theCUBE,
covering Google Cloud Next 2018.
Brought to you by Google Cloud
and its ecosystem partners.
>> Hello everyone, welcome back.
It's theCUBE here in San Francisco, live coverage
of Google Cloud Next 2018.
I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante,
our next guest is Ben Evans,
who is the director of strategic alliances at Cisco,
and Connie Tang, director of product management at Cisco
here to talk about the alliance with Google Cloud
and the relevance of the partnership around the collab.
Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us.
>> My pleasure to be here.
>> So, we've been covering Cisco for a long time,
most recently with theCUBE in Orlando,
and DevNet creates huge surge of developer action
going on across the Cisco ecosystem,
not just network engineering stuff,
the normal Cisco greatness, but up the stack
with the collaboration side just cloud natives
attracting and really giving a lot of energy
to the developers and customers at Cisco.
So, the partnership with Google is interesting.
So, can you guys just share the big news,
the Cisco news and how that relates to the Google Cloud.
>> Yeah, absolutely, so firstly, Connie and myself have been
working on this partnership for quite a while.
And, as you'd said, there's multi, kind of, facets to this.
There's the developer piece, so the SDKs
are announcing around Android and the way
that developers can now imbed calling and meeting
and messaging inside their specific applications,
their vertical applications.
And, then there's also native integrations
we're getting into around
scheduling meetings from calenderings.
I can go in and schedule a Webex meeting very easily.
It was talked about on stage, 74 percent of,
sort of, document collaboration involves
some sort of co-collaboration,
so it's a very kind of peanut butter and chocolate
as you think about Cisco's portfolio of real time
communications and meetings and how this is evolving
into the team collaboration experience.
Together with Google's portfolio in terms of
AI and how that fits in to ultimate these work flows
and make life easier for users.
And, also just how this comes together
in a very seamless way to enable this kind of real time
collaboration and creation of documents.
>> So, take us inside the partnership.
How did it start?
I mean, it seems like a match made in heaven.
You guys aren't trying to create
your own infrastructures of service.
Google needs an enterprise presence,
so obviously Cisco has a huge enterprise presence.
But, how did it start and where did it start?
>> We actually started engaging with Cisco over a year ago,
and different groups start engaging
because there's actually customer demand
from our corporate enterprise customers
wanting better integration of a collab portfolio
into various aspects of G Suite.
So, we worked with the calendering team
because they're coming up with
a brand new architecture, and so we're actually
one of four front partners who work directly with them
providing them feedback in what enterprises what,
and then integrating our scheduling capabilities
of Webex meetings directly into Google Calender.
So that's one piece, and then we also work
with the Chromebook group because more and more
customers are starting to use and deploy Chromebook,
and so they want to have an ability
to start Webex meetings and be able to share content
and actually join Webex meetings directly on Chromebook.
So, there's another effort that went on separately.
And then there's a third effort that goes on
with the Chrome group where we're leveraging
the WebRTC within Chrome, so that people
can join Webex meeting directly without having
to do download any client.
So, they just open the web browser.
They can have audio.
They can have HD video.
They can see the share.
They can share content just on Chrome.
>> When?
>> This is what we've been waiting for with cloud.
This is really, I want to expand
on this notion of services.
>> Yes.
>> And service centric view because it has to be clean
whether it's an EPI, a message que, or an event.
The user experience's got to be integrated very cleanly.
>> Yes.
>> This is really kind of, the ah-ha moment
of when people taste the Cloud, and that's the benefit.
Can, because this is really interesting.
You've got Webex, you've got G Suite.
Two different applications.
>> Very different, yes.
>> This is the benefit of the services.
Can you just explain the importance
and why IT and why enterprises want this.
>> Enterprises want ease of use.
Ease of use, ease of access, and ease of deployment.
So, Chrome solves that problem.
There's no deployment required, right?
It's already there, it's available on every desktop.
And, the one simple click to join and schedule a meeting
makes it easy to use, so with that
combination, end use is adopted really, really quickly.
So, we're seeing some of the fastest adoption
of web clients based on those kind of
ease of use and ease of joining.
>> How has the product uptake been?
Because if you have a seamless user experience,
you're probably getting more customers
coming in, integrating in...
>> Yes.
>> From G Suite and vice versa.
They're getting lift.
How is that partnership working?
Can you share some color around that?
>> Yes, as Connie said, we've really seen it's accelerating.
One stat I'll share is during March, we were adding
around 11 hundred new G Cal integrations every day,
so we were seeing customers that
were using Webex meeting, they were using G cal,
and they wanted those things to work better together.
So, integrating those calendars to make
it easier to schedule and join meetings.
So, yeah, that's 11 hundred a day.
It's pretty good uptake considering
we weren't really promoting it.
It was just there and available to
that existing customer base, so.
>> What can you guys share to enterprise IT,
application developers, or managers who have
traditionally lived in a stone pipe world
of like, let's build an app, and we'll distribute the app,
and you log in, you do all the things, monolithic app.
To a world that's services lead are service centric
where you still do an app, but you got to think
differently around some of the design criteria
around integrating in with other apps.
What's some of the best practices that you guys have found?
Because you've seen the network all the way
up to the application stack issues.
You've got Kubernetes and all these new things.
What are some of the best practices
that companies should be developing around?
>> So, what I've seen companies most concerned about
is applications affecting other
applications on the desktop,
and hence, breaking some of their services.
The web services kind of completely remove that.
Because there's a web browser,
they don't have to worry about it impacting
any of their installed applications.
And so, what we find out as IT looks into
this mode of deployment, it's not really
a deployment, it's an enablement.
They actually really advertise it to their end users.
They actually rather end users use the web client
than to have to install, and they have to test
and slow the roll out.
>> What do you guys see as, I mean,
I'm old enough to remember when Lotus Notes
was the state of the art collaboration.
(laughs)
>> That's real old.
Man, that's old.
>> I was digging myself.
So, now you're talking a lot about integration,
simplifying the experience, obviously
video has come into play.
>> Yes.
What do you guys see as the mega trends
and maybe give us a little glimpse of the road map
as to what we can expect going forward
whether it's AI or other data?
Where does that all fit in?
>> Yeah, I think you nailed it.
So, there's this kind of better together, easy join,
it's just table stakes right now.
The ability for me to easily join a meeting,
but where that's really rapidly going is the AI space.
So, how can I augment that meeting?
Before I join, how do I know about you as individuals,
what you care about, what's happening with your company?
So, a company acquisition we did recently,
you know, fits into that in terms
of how do we start surfacing information about the people.
If I'm in the meeting, if I want to be able
to click on someone and get more context about them.
What happened in my previous engagements,
what have we previously talked about?
How do we surface that up in a timely fashion?
And, when again you think about Google Calender
and the information it knows about you as an individual,
Cisco with the kind of matrix of who you're calling
and what meetings have taken place,
there's kind of a tantalizing thing there about
how you blend that together.
So, you surface the information,
you automate this kind of, the repetitive,
more mundane tasks, and free the people up
to focus more on innovation and collaboration relationships.
>> And the analytics opportunity is pretty big.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> I mean Diane Green said in her keynote,
security is the number one worry,
AI is the number one opportunity.
By freeing up the mundane tasks,
automating that away, the value will shift to up the stack.
We were using a metaphor with Jennifer Lynd from Google.
You know, when the horse and buggy was, you know,
killed by the car, those jobs went away.
There was no need for stuff, you know,
the horse, the hay, and all that stuff.
IT, same thing.
Things are shifting, operations are changing.
>> Yeah.
>> This is fundamental.
>> Context is a great example of that.
You know, if you look at what's happening
in that market, you know, the predictions
that they're call flows are going to decrease
isn't really happening.
What's happening is you're going to multi-channel,
and people are doing the more basic stuff online,
just fixing issues, but when it becomes complex,
when it becomes relationship, it becomes high enough value,
then you want the personal interaction,
so I think the way personally I look at AI
is it will free up computers.
They're doing this kind of more repetitive finding patterns,
but when it comes to talking to the doctor
about, you know, your condition
or you're trying to build relationships,
there's things that people just naturally do very well.
And, plowing through lots of data to find patterns,
we don't do great, so.
>> It's actually quite amazing when you look
at the trends over the last decade or so
in terms of collaboration.
I mean, it used to be, I was joking about Lotus Notes,
but it used to be you'd request people to show up
15 minutes early so you could sort out all the problems.
And now today, if you're like a minute late,
people are like texting you, "Where are you? Let's go."
So, we become so much more productive,
and the protocol has changed.
So, when you think about how machine intelligence
is going to affect productivity going forward,
it's potentially massive.
>> Yeah, we see massive opportunities.
As you know, to really get the benefit from AI,
you need some pretty big data sets,
so again, just thinking about Webex for a second,
six billion minutes a month in meetings.
I'm not saying we're going to push all that
straight into Google, but when you think about
what's tied up in those six billion minutes.
>> A lot of video.
>> What's been discussed, how easily can I unlock that?
How do I get insights from it?
How do I train models?
It's like, again, the combination of huge data sets.
>> AI would be just amazing.
You just go, "Hey, I missed that Webex.
Give me the highlight reel."
>> Yes. >> Exactly.
>> That would be great.
>> Not only that, but how do you
customize that for the individuals?
>> Or if I missed the first ten minutes,
can I go scroll back?
Can I actually review, get the transcription?
And, if I need some additional information,
can I just pull it up and it shows up, you know,
for me within the meeting, right?
So, there's just massive opportunities
that we're looking at.
>> And, the user expectations, the new experience,
that's what people are really designing around,
what they're expectations should be.
>> Yes.
>> And they're making that user...
Okay, Connie and Ben, I want to get
one last question in before we break.
Two parts, for each of you.
What's the most important story from your perspective
here at the show this week that you're talking about
and sharing, and what's next for you guys?
Ben, we'll start with you.
>> So, yeah, my two answers are firstly,
the initial kind of integrations we're putting together.
People should go check that out
because, you know, there's some very compelling
use cases that we're fixing there.
But, the big item is Cisco and Google working
together to really tackle this kind of future of work,
and the combination of those two portfolios
is going to unlock some really interesting opportunities,
and that's what the teams are kind of getting together,
working on, defining, and stay tuned to kind of
see those phase two, phase three deliverables.
>> Future words.
Great, Connie, from a product perspective,
what's the hottest things that you've
been talking about here, most important,
and then what's next.
>> Yeah, for us, it's really the
Google and Cisco coming together
in a collaboration space, working together
to make it much easier and simpler for customers
to deploy and use the products.
And, also to explore new opportunities
in transcription and AI,
leveraging Google Assist right to,
and just make it even better in the future.
>> Scale up the experience.
>> Yes.
>> Probably expect some great
developer opportunities going on.
>> Yes.
>> Exploring and reinventing the enterprise.
That was Diane Green's theme.
She'll be here on theCUBE breaking it down.
I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante.
Live coverage, here we have Cisco collaboration
inside theCUBE, big relationship, expansion with Google.
New product integrations, the value
of the services within the cloud.
The new model for development and user experience.
theCUBE bringing you all the content here on the floor.
Stay with us for more live coverage after the short break.
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