>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California.
It's theCUBE.
covering Cisco Live US 2019.
Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back to San Diego, everybody.
You're watching Cisco Live 2019.
This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.
This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage.
We go out to the events,
we extract the signal from the noise.
My name is Dave Vellante.
Stu Miniman is here.
Our third host, Lisa Martin is also in the house.
Dave Malik is here.
He's a fellow and Chief Architect at Cisco.
David, good to see you.
>> Oh, glad to be here. >> Thanks for coming on.
First of all, congratulations on being a fellow.
What does that mean, a Cisco Fellow?
What do you got to go through to achieve that status?
>> It's pretty arduous task.
It's one of the most highest technical
designations in Cisco,
but we work across multiple architectures in technologies,
as well as our partners, as well,
to drive corporate-wide strategy.
>> So you've been talking to customers here,
you've been presenting.
I think you said you gave three presentations here?
Multi-cloud, blockchain,
and some stuff on machine intelligence, ML.
>> Yes.
>> Let's hit those.
Kind of summarize the overall themes,
and then we'll maybe get into each,
and then we got a zillion questions for you.
>> Sure, excellent.
So multi-cloud, I think one of the customers,
we're clearly hearing from them is around,
how do we get a universal policy model
and connectivity model,
and how do you orchestrate workloads seamlessly?
And those are some of the challenges
that we trying to address at this conference.
On blockchain, a lot of buzz out there.
We're not talking about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency,
it's really about leveraging blockchain
from a networking perspective,
or an identity and encryption,
and providing a uniform ledger
that everything is pervasive across infrastructure.
And then ML, I think it's the heart of every conversation.
How do we take pervasive analytics
and bring it into the network
so we can drive actionable insights into automation?
>> So let's start with the third one.
When you talk about ML,
was your talk on machine learning?
Did it spill into artificial intelligence?
What's the difference to you from a technology perspective?
>> Machine learning is really getting a lot of the data
and looking at repetitive patterns
in a very common fashion,
and doing a massive correlation across multiple domains.
So you may have some things happening in the branch,
the data set, or a WAN in cloud,
but the whole idea is
how do you put them together to drive insight?
And through artificial intelligence and algorithms,
we can try to take those insights and automate them
and push them back into the infrastructure
or to the application layer.
So now you're driving intelligence for
not just consumers or devices,
but also humans as well to drive insight.
>> All right.
So Dave, I wonder if you'd help connect with us
what you were talking about there,
and we'll get to the multicloud piece
because I was at an Amazon show last week from Amazon,
talking about how when they look at all the technologies
that they use to get packages, their fulfillment centers,
everything that they do as a business,
ML and AI, they said, is underneath that,
and AWS is what's driving that technology
from that standpoint.
Now, multicloud, AWS is a partner of yours.
>> Yes.
>> Can you give us how you work in multicloud
and does ML and IA, is that a Cisco specific?
Are you working with some of the standards out there
to connect all those pieces?
Help us look at some of the big picture of those items.
>> So we believe we're agnostic,
whether you connect to Amazon, Azure, Google, et cetera,
we believe in a uniform policy model
and connectivity model,
which is very, very arduous today.
So you shouldn't have to have a specific policy model,
connectivity model, security model for that matter,
for each provider.
So we're normalizing that plane completely,
which is awesome.
Then, at a workload level,
regardless of whether your workload is spun up or spun down,
it should have the same security posture and visibility.
We have certain customers that are
running as single applications across multiple clouds,
so your data is going to be obviously on-prem,
you may be running analytics in TenserFlow,
compute in EC2, and connecting to O365, that's one app.
And where we're seeing the models go is
are you leveraging technology such as this?
Do you offer service mesh?
How do we tie a lot of these micro-services together
and then be able to layer workload orchestration on top?
So regardless of where your workload sits,
and one key point that we keep hearing from our customers
is their ungovernance.
How we provide cloud-based governance
regardless of where their workload is,
and that's something we're doing in a very large fashion
with customers that have a multicloud strategy.
>> So Stu, I think there's still some confusion around
multicloud generally, and maybe Cisco's strategy.
I wonder if we could maybe clear it up a little bit.
>> Dave, it's that big elephant in the room,
and I always feel like everybody describes multicloud
from a different angle.
>> So let's dig into this a little bit,
and let's hear from Cisco's perspective.
So you got, to my count, five companies
really going after this space.
You got Cisco, VMware, IBM Red Hat,
Microsoft, and Google with Anthos.
Probably all those guys are partners of yours.
>> Yes.
>> Okay, but you guys want to provide the bromide
or the single pane of glass, okay.
I'm hearing open and agnostic.
That's a differentiator.
Security, you're in a good position to make an argument
that you're in a good position to make things secure.
You got the network and so forth.
High-performance network, and cost-effective.
Everybody's going to make that argument
relative to having multiple stovepipes,
but that's part of your story as well.
So the question. Why Cisco?
What's the key differentiator
and what gives you confidence that
you can really help win in this marketplace?
>> So our core competencies are our networking and security.
Whether it's cloud-based security
or on-prem security, it's uniform.
From a security perspective,
we have a universal architecture.
Whether it's the endpoint, the edge, the cloud,
they're all sharing information and intelligence.
That's really important.
Instead of having bespoke products,
these products and solutions need to communicate
with each other, so if someone's sick in one area,
we're informing the other one.
So threat intelligence and network intelligence is huge.
Then more importantly, after working with
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon,
we have on-prem solutions as well,
so as customers are going on their multicloud journey,
and eventually the workload will transition,
you have the same management experience
and security experience.
So Anthos was a recent announcement,
AWS as well, where you can run on-prem Kubernetes,
and you can take the same workload
and move it to AWS or GCP,
but the management model and the control pane model,
they are extremely similar
and you don't have to learn anything new
from a training perspective.
>> Okay, but I used the term agnostic, oh, no.
You did agnostic, I said open.
But you don't care if it's Anthos or VMware,
or OpenShift, you don't care.
>> Don't care.
>> And, architecturally, how is it
that you can successfully not care?
>> Because the underlying, fundamental principles is
you can load any workload you want with this,
bare metal, virtualized, or Kubernetes-based containers,
they all need the same.
For example, everyone needs bread and water.
It's not different.
So why should you be able to discriminate
against a workload or OpenShare
if they're using Pivotal Cloud Foundry, for example?
The same model, all applications still need
security, visibility, networking, and management,
but they should not be different across all clouds,
and that's traditionally what you're seeing
from the other vendors in the market.
They're very unique to their stovepipe,
and we want to break down those stovepipes across the board,
regardless of what app and what workload you have.
>> Dave, talk a little bit about the automation
that Cisco's delivering to help enable this
because there's skill set challenges,
just the scale of these environments are
more than humans alone can take care of,
so how does that automation,
I know you're heavily involved in the CX beast of Cisco.
How does that all tie together?
>> So we're working on a lot of automation projects
with our large enterprises and SPs,
I mean, you see Rakuten being fairly prominent in the show,
but more importantly,
we understand not everyone's building
a greenfield environment,
not everything is purely public cloud.
We have to deal with brownfield,
we have to deal with third-party ecosystem partners,
so you can't have a vertically tight single-vendor solution.
So again, to your point, it's completely open.
Then we have frameworks,
meaning you have orchestrators that can
talk down to the device through programmatic interfaces.
That's why we see DevNet surrounding us,
but then more importantly,
we're looking at services that have workflows
that could span on-prem, off-prem, third-party,
it doesn't really matter.
And we stitch a lot of those workloads southbound,
but more importantly, northbound
to security at ITSM Systems.
So those frameworks are coming into life,
whether you're a telecom cloud provider
or you're a large enterprise.
And they slowly fall into those workflows
as they become more multi-domain.
You saw David Goeckeler the other day,
talking about SD-WAN, ECI, and campus wired and wireless.
These domains are coming together and
that's where we're driving a lot of the automation work.
>> So automation is a linchpin to what business outcome?
Ultimately, what are customers trying to
achieve through automation?
>> There's a couple of things.
Mean time to value.
So if you're a service provider,
to your internal customers or external,
time to value and speed and agility are key.
The other ones are mean time to repair
and mean time to detect.
If I can shorten the time to detect
and shorten time to react,
then I can take proactive and preemptive action
in situations that may happen.
So time to value is really, really important.
Cost is a play, obviously,
'cause when you have more and more machines
doing your work, your OPEX will come down,
but it's really not purely a cost play.
Agility and speed are really driving automation
to that scale as we're working with folks
like Rakuten and others.
>> What do you see, Dave, as the big challenges
of achieving automation when customers,
first of all, I was talking like, 10, 15 years ago
people, they were afraid of automation.
Some still are.
But they I think understand
as part of a digital transformation,
they got to automate.
So what are the challenges that they're having
and how are you helping them solve them?
>> So typically, what people have thought about automation
has been more network-centric,
but as we just discussed multicloud,
automation is extending all the way to the public cloud,
at the workload or at the functional level,
if you're running in Lambda, for example.
And then more importantly, traditionally,
customers have been leveraging Python scripts
and things of that nature,
but the days of scripters are there,
but they cannot scale.
You need a model-driven framework,
you need model-driven telemetry to get insight.
So I think the learning curve of customers moving
to a model-driven mindset is extremely important,
and it's not just about the network alone,
it's also about the application.
So that's why we're driving a lot of our frameworks
and education and training.
And talent's a big gap that we're helping with
with our training programs.
>> Okay, so you're talking about insights.
There's a lot of data.
The saying goes, "data is plentiful, insights aren't."
So how do you get from data to insights?
Is that where the machine intelligence comes in?
Maybe you can explain that.
>> There's a combination.
Machines can process much faster than humans can,
but more importantly,
somebody has to drive the 30 or 40 years of experience
that Cisco has from our tech, our architects and CX,
and our customers and the community
that we're developing through DevNet.
So taking trusted expertise from humans,
from all that knowledge base,
combining that with machine learning
so we get the best of both worlds.
'Cause you need that experience.
And that is driving insight
so we can filter the signal from the noise,
and then more importantly,
how do you take that signal and then,
in an automated fashion, push that down
to an intent-based architecture across the board.
>> Dave, can you take us inside a little bit
of your touchpoints into customers?
In the old days, it was a CCIE, his job, his title,
it was equipment that he would touch,
and today, talking about this multicloud
and the automation, it's very dispersed as to who owns it,
most of what I am managing is not something
that's under their purview,
so the touchpoints you have into the company
and the relationship you have
changed a lot in the last three, five years or so.
>> Absolutely, 'cause the buying center's also changing,
because folks are getting more and more
centric around the line of business
and want the outcome we want to drive for their clients.
So the cloud architecture teams that are being built,
they're more horizontal now.
You'll have a security person, an application,
networking, operations, for example,
and what we're actually pioneering,
a lot of the enterprises and SPs,
is building the site reliability engineering teams, or SRE,
which Google has obviously pioneered,
and we're bringing those concepts and teams
through a CX framework, through telecos,
and some of their high-end enterprises initially,
and you'll see more around that over the coming months.
Our SRE jobs, if you go on LinkedIn,
you'll probably see hundreds of them out there now.
>> One of the other things we've been watching is
Cisco has a very broad portfolio.
This whole CX piece has to make sure that,
from a customer's standpoint,
no matter where the portfolio, whether core, edge, IOT,
all these various devices,
I should have a simplified experience today,
which isn't necessarily, my words, Cisco's legacy.
How do you make sure,
is software a unifying factor inside the company?
Give us a little bit about those dynamics inside.
>> Absolutely, so we take a life cycle approach.
It's not one and done.
From the time there's a concept where
you want to build out a blueprint,
but there's no transformation journey,
we have to make sure we walk the client through
preparation, planning, design, architecture optimization,
but then making sure they actually adopt,
and get the true value.
So we're working with our customers to make sure that
they go around the entire life cycle,
from end to end, from cradle to grave,
and be able to constantly optimize.
You're hearing the word continuous pretty much everywhere.
It's kind of the fundamental of CICD,
so we believe in a continuous life cycle approach
that we're walking the customers end to end
to make sure from the point of purchase
to the point of decommissioning,
making sure they're getting the most value
out of the solutions they're getting from Cisco.
>> All right Dave, we'll give you
the last word on Cisco Live 2019.
Thoughts? Takeaways?
>> I think there's just amazing energy here,
and there's a lot more to come.
Come down to the CX booth and we'll have to show you
some more gadgets and solutions
where we're taking our forward customers.
>> Great. David, thank you very much for coming to The Cube.
>> Pleasure, thank you.
>> All right, 28,000 people and
The Cube bringing it to you live.
This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman.
Lisa Martin is also in the house.
We'll be right back from Cisco Live San Diego 2019, Day 3.
You're watching The Cube.