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>> Hello and welcome back to the live coverage here
at Cisco Live, this is theCUBE.
John and Dave hosts, bringing you day two coverage.
Dave, great to be here, we've been covering Cisco
for 13 years, day two keynotes, keynote analysis.
Last night we had the analyst reception
where we met all the execs, saw the CEO and staff,
had a chance to meet Chuck and Robbins
and talked with them, as well as the leadership team
of Cisco, so, and we got a little taste
of what was going to come today in the keynote
with the generative AI, workplace of the future,
surprise comedian guest at the end,
which I thought was great, but also the CSO,
Chief Security Officer of the NFL was on stage,
J2 Patel, Jonathan Davidson, we didn't see Liz,
Tony on there, but we saw the other two execs.
Keynote review, what's your take?
>> Well, so we mused yesterday as to whether,
or not Cisco had the potential to 5x its valuation
over the next, you know, end number of years,
call it 10 years, and whether or not AI
and generative AI and large language models
could be the opportunity for them to do that.
We got a little glimpse today of what they're doing
with AI, with hybrid work, and I saw some very cool things.
I don't think I saw the next big thing,
and my takeaway from today was that Cisco
was going to continue to execute,
they're going to continue to grow,
they're going to continue to do well,
and they're going to make solid bets
that will lead to good, and I don't mean this
as a pejorative, incremental improvements.
I don't see anything radical in there.
Now, again, I think they're trying to figure that out.
I feel like the leadership team believes
that they have an opportunity that is unique in the industry
because of their presence,
and they just haven't sort of unveiled,
or even to themselves, figured out, okay,
what is that thing?
And it could come from anywhere.
It could come from somebody in the front lines,
somebody overseas, out of the Liz's division
that we can't figure out.
We can't remember the name, outshift division, right?
The outshift, which is the incubation engine
of Cisco, could come out of that.
I love that area.
Yeah, absolutely, and then,
I mean, the highlight for me was Gaffigan.
Jim Gaffigan, he was hilarious.
I mean, that guy came out, he told a bunch of dad jokes,
you know, kid jokes.
He's just really good.
>> He aligned with a demographic for sure.
>> Oh, yeah.
Mostly male network operators.
>> Yeah, he says, I look around this audience,
and I see a bunch of old guys,
and it was pretty true.
>> Now, given that the keynote,
I thought a couple themes jumped out.
I mean, Jonathan Davidson laid out unified experiences,
build bridges.
Clearly, they're going for this simplicity theme,
as we reported yesterday,
but this idea of unification, not new to Cisco.
They used to have unified as part of their compute model.
Remember that unified compute?
They tried to bring hyperconverge all that together
under a unified umbrella.
Here, they're thinking bigger, unified platforms.
So, that was a big part of it.
And they also brought execs up on stage.
Thousand Eye founder was still with the company,
and that's a real tell sign when you have the founder
of Thousand Eye still with Cisco.
Don't really found it when they sell to companies.
They quit.
>> They go start another company.
>> They start another company.
>> To compete with the last company.
>> Thousand Eye is one of the best
acquisitions Cisco's done.
Meraki as well.
Founders still around.
Always a great sign of health.
>> Yeah.
Yeah, so, and then, you know, again,
big theme was hybrid work.
Gigi Patel talked about four key vectors.
Where they're using AI.
Audio intelligence.
And basically, their premise,
which is I think the right one is,
if you don't have good sound,
you don't have any kind of interaction.
We know this from theCUBE.
You sound you're dead.
>> Audio is everything.
>> Right, and then the second was video intelligence,
which I thought was very interesting.
They showed a demo, and it's so true.
When you're in an hour and a half or a two hour meeting,
and you got the same exact pains,
and people may be getting up,
you know, leaving the room, coming back,
getting a drink or whatever with the same static pains,
it gets really boring.
>> So what he showed is a demo
where the people in the room,
the camera would follow them.
You were saying it was robo cams.
I'd like to ask Gigi too,
how many cams they were actually using in that demo.
But it was a really interactive experience,
almost like you were watching a movie.
So audio intelligence, video intelligence.
Third was natural language understanding.
So NLP, presumably to do real time translations,
which is pretty powerful.
And I've seen that go really well, actually.
And you go back and you can look at the transcript
identify things you missed,
or maybe you were checking a quick email
and putting out a fire,
and you got to go back and watch.
And then the last one was analytics and insight.
So basically it's the telepresence,
and he also talked about the Apple deal.
They're not being really...
>> He basically blew right over that.
>> Yeah, they're not really saying much about it,
but we think they're inside that mask, right?
Inside the eyeglass.
>> I have sources that tell me
that Apple has done a deal with Cisco,
again, not fully confirmed, confirmed a little bit.
So put that out there.
It's not a rumor, but it's pretty much good source.
That Cisco's technology, not WebEx, the telepresence,
they got some deep technology, wave form technology,
all kinds of cool shit,
is going to be embedded in the display of Apple vision.
Okay, now we know Apple.
I know Apple really well.
They're tight on messaging.
They don't let people do testimonials.
So, J2 kind of fumbled by just mentioning it.
He didn't fumble, but I'd say that he mentioned it,
but he couched it almost like a lawyer.
>> But he didn't want to screw it up.
>> He didn't want to screw a wording.
And he just said, Apple vision,
we're going to be working with him.
>> We really love the products.
>> And then next, WebEx.
He didn't really, he kind of announced it,
but he didn't do anything.
>> Yeah, well, so let's talk about that a little bit.
So a couple of things too, I want to add to that.
One is NVIDIA.
He said they have NVIDIA in all their devices.
And I'd like to understand where they're using them.
For instance, Apple uses a GPUs inside of the iPhone,
but my understanding is from my sources
that it's just for the screen,
for the screen interactions
to make that as real time as possible.
They're not using it for other purposes yet anyway.
And so similarly, I wonder exactly which technologies
are inside that Apple headset, those goggles.
And so, but the fact that it's Cisco says a lot
in terms of, you know, their ability to deal with,
you know, things like latency
and just, you know, good user experiences.
So, but he's probably not going to talk about it
because he can't.
>> You know, the other thing I liked
about the product description was
he did a lot of product stuff,
but also he had a business model innovation.
That was if they're building natively on Teams
in Office 365s.
And what they're doing is they're building
the native Teams functionality inside WebEx.
So rather than trying to compete with Teams,
they're going to go compatible with Teams and be follower.
So, and they also point out the business model.
So for Teams, you got to pick extra for calling,
extra async video, extra for webinars,
extra for events, extra for polling.
>> And the Teams paper cuts.
And they're right about that.
And so that, and they're going to,
and that's going to increase the cost of 64 bucks
as high as $64 per user where WebEx is 11,
you get all that same cost.
So I thought that was notable.
The true cost of hybrid work, he called it.
>> I think the other thing, John,
that I would point out is sort of doubling down
on something that you said yesterday,
like why is G2 Patel heading up both collaboration
and security, and I think your answer was right on.
It's because he's a platform guy.
He knows platforms.
And Cisco's in the process of moving from a product culture
to a platform culture, from push the next feature
to let the ecosystem and the customers guide us
as to what features we want to enable on the platform.
That's a different mindset, different thinking.
And it really, I mean, the mindset
can't be understated, right?
It's like culture.
You know, when you've been so successful,
a company like Cisco, with a sort of selling boxes,
selling ports for years, and I know they're beyond that,
but still, at the end of the day,
they make 50% of their revenues from networking gear.
So to get the whole company thinking
about platforms is a challenge.
Antonio Neary has this challenge at HPE.
Michael Dell and Jeff Clark and Chuck Whitten
at Dell Technologies have this challenge.
You know, it's easier for software companies.
I mean, Oracle went through that,
and obviously has been pretty successful.
Snowflake is another example.
Databricks is doing it as well.
These are platform, the Mongo.
Right, they're non-ISVs, they're platform companies.
>> And the platform trend is going to continue to happen
with tools building on top,
but the platforms is an enabling technology.
They have to enable on top of it.
And what I saw today from Jade Tupetel
was the fact that they have things like
a generative AI working, they're getting things going.
So you're starting to see more and more of that.
And of course, my favorite point of the keynote
was the NFL CSO, she said quote,
physical and cyber security is converged.
That's the way they look at it.
And I think that's a new normal.
That is going to be absolutely a thing.
So no point solutions.
Security market's not there, and that's the way it is.
>> Yep, yep, speaking of security,
I mean, it's a little kerfuffle on Twitter
with Key Townsend if you're out there.
You know, Cisco unquestionably is a player in security.
It's a multi-billion, $4 billion business, let's call it.
But in fairness, you know, it's not growing that fast.
It's growing to 2% last quarter,
and that should grow faster.
And that's why I think G2 brought in Tom Gillis
to really help drive that business.
But to your point, they got to bring security
and networking together, and that's going to give them
a significant advantage.
>> All right, day two of theCube, more action here at
theCube, pop-up Cube, that's what we do
when we can't get space.
We will do whatever it takes to get the story.
Pop-up Cube, the big full set, one-on-ones.
We want to get the data and share that with you.
Go to siliconangle.com, cube.net,
that's where the action is.
We'll be back with more after this short break
from Las Vegas.
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