>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE!
Covering Cisco Live 2020.
Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage
of Cisco Live 2020, here in Barcelona.
Our third year of the show, over 17,000 in attendance
between the Cisco people, their large partner ecosystem,
and the customers, I'm Stu Miniman,
my cohost for this segment is Dave Vellante.
John Furrier's scouring the show
for all of the news at the event, and joining us,
we have two first time guests on the program,
first, sitting to my left is Patrick Smith,
who is the field CTO for EMEA with Pure Storage.
Sitting to his left is Eric Greffier,
who is the managing director of EMEAR specialists
with Cisco, so you have a slightly larger region
than Patrick does, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us.
>> Patrick: Great to be here.
>> All right, so, we know this show,
we were talking that broad ecosystem,
and of course Cisco in the data center group
has very strong storage partnerships,
highlighted by their converged infrastructure stacks.
I wrote my research many many years ago,
Cisco's brilliant job was
when they entered the server market,
they made sure that that fragmented storage ecosystem,
they made partnerships across the board.
And of course, when Pure's ascendancy with the flash era
made the stack, so helping to paint those data centers
orange with your Cisco partnership,
so Patrick, give us the update here, 2020,
what's interesting and important to know
about Pure Storage and Cisco customer base?
>> You know, we continue to see significant adoption
of FlashStack, our converged infrastructure with Cisco.
Driving just great interest and great growth,
both for Pure and for Cisco with the UCS platform,
and the value that the customers see in FlashStack,
bringing together storage, networking and compute
together with overall automation of the stack,
and that really gives customers fantastic time to value.
And that's what they're looking for in this day and age.
>> All right, and Eric, what differentiates the partnership
with Pure, versus, as you said,
you do work with many of the storage companies out there.
>> Well, we had a baby together,
it was called FlashStack,
and it was couple of years ago now,
and as you said, I think the key element for us
is really to have those CVDs,
those Cisco Validated Designs together,
and FlashStack was a great addition
to our existing partnership at that time,
talking about a couple of years ago.
And of course, with the flash technology of Pure,
we've seen the demand that we'd say going and going,
and it has been amazing, amazing trajectory together.
>> But talk a little bit more about the CVDs,
the different use cases that you're seeing.
You don't have to go through all 20,
but maybe pick a couple of your favorite children.
>> Well, just to make sure that people understand
what CVD means, it's Cisco Validated Design,
and this is kind of an outcome in the form of a document,
which is available for customers and partners,
which is the outcome of the partnership from R&D to R&D,
which is just telling customers and partners
what they need to order and have in it
to fit all of this together for a specific business outcome.
And the reason why we have multiple CVDs,
is we have one CVD per use case.
So the more use cases we have together,
the more the CVD's precise, and you just have to follow
the CVD design principles.
Of course, the later swarms, and maybe Patrick
can say a word, but we've been of course
doing things regarding analytics and AI,
because this is a big demand right now,
so maybe Patrick, you want to say a word on this.
>> Yeah, you guys were first with the AI
and bringing AI and storage together
with your partnership with Nvidia,
so maybe double down on that.
>> The FlashBlade was our move into building
a storage platform for AI and model analytics,
and we've seen tremendous success with that
in lots of different verticals.
And so with Cisco we launched FlashStack for AI,
which brings together FlashBlade networking,
and Cisco's fantastic compute platform
with capability for considerable scale of Nvidia GPUs.
So an in-a-box capability
to really deliver fast time to market solutions
for the growing world of analytics and modern AI,
people want quick insight into the vast amounts of data
we have, and so FlashStack for AI
is really important for us being able to deliver
as part of the Cisco ecosystem,
and provide customers with a platform for success.
>> What's happening with modernization, generally,
but specifically in Europe,
obviously Cisco, long history in Europe,
Pure, you've got a presence here, good presence,
but obviously much newer.
Larger proportion, far larger proportion
is in North America,
so it's a real opportunity for you guys.
What are you seeing in terms of
modernization of infrastructure,
and apps in the European community?
>> Modernization I think is particularly important,
and it's more and more seen under the guise
of digital transformation,
because investing in infrastructure
just doesn't get the credit that sometimes it deserves.
But the big push there is really all around
simpler infrastructure, easier management,
and the push for automation.
Organizations don't want to have
large infrastructure support teams
who are either installing or managing
in a heavy touch way, their environments,
and so the push towards automation,
not just at the infrastructure layer,
but all the way up the stack, is really key.
And you know, we were talking earlier,
behind us we have the DevNet sessions here,
all about how customers of Cisco and by correlation Pure,
can really optimize the management to their environment,
use technology like Intersight, like Ansible and others,
to really minimize the overhead of managing technology,
deliver services faster to customers
and be more agile, in this always-on world that we live in,
there's no time to really add a human
to the cycle of managing infrastructure.
>> I think we've been very proud over the years
because this notion of converged infrastructure,
which was, the promise was to simplify and modernize
the data centers, before it was like,
"Everything needs to get connected to anything,"
and coming was this notion of a pod, everything converged,
"We've done the job for you, mister customer,
"just think about adding some pod."
This has been the promise for the last 10 years,
and we've been very proud,
almost to have created this market,
but it wouldn't have been possible without the partnership
with the storage players, and with Pure,
we've been one step further in terms
of simplifying things for customers.
>> I love the extension you're talking about,
because absolutely converged infrastructure
was supposed to deliver on that simplicity,
and it was, let's think of the entire rack
as a unit of how we manage it,
but with today's applications, with the speed of change
happening in the environment,
we've gone beyond human speed,
and so therefore if we don't have
the automation that you were talking about,
we can't keep up with what the business
needs to be able to do there.
>> Yeah, that's what it's all about,
it's the rapid rate of change.
Whether it's business services,
whether it's supporting developers
in the developer environment,
more and more our customers are becoming
software development organizations,
their developers are a key resource,
and making them as efficient as possible
is really important, so being able to quickly spin up
development environments, new environments for developers,
using snapshot technology,
giving them the latest sets of data
to test their applications on,
is really central to enabling and empowering the developer.
>> You know, you talk about Cisco's play
and kind of creation of the converged infrastructure,
Mark, and I think that's fair, by the way.
Others may claim it, but I think the mantle goes to you.
But there were two friction points, or headwinds,
that we pointed out early in the day,
the first was organizational,
the servers team, the storage team,
the network team didn't speak together,
then the practitioner told us one day,
"Look, you want to solve that problem,
"put it in and watch what happens."
'Cause if you try to figure out the organization
you'll never get there,
and that sort of took care of itself.
The other was the channel.
The channel likes things separate,
they can add value, they have this sort of
box selling mentality, so I wonder if you could update us
on what the mindset is in the channel,
and how that's evolved.
>> Yeah, it's a great question.
I think the channel actually really likes
the simplicity of a converged infrastructure to sell,
it's a very simple message, and it really empowers
the channel to take, to your point about organization,
they have the full stack, all in one sellable item,
and so they don't have to fight
for the different components,
it's one consistent unit that they sell as a whole,
and so I think it simplifies the channel,
and actually, we find that customers
are actively seeking out, it's shown by our growth
with FlashStack that customers are actually seeking out
the channel partners who are selling FlashStack.
>> Yeah, and do you think the channel realizes,
"Wow, we really do have to go up the stack,
"add more value, do things like partner with"?
>> Well for most of the partners,
they were heavily specialized on storage or compute
or network, so for most of them,
supporting the converged infrastructure
was to be able to put a foot into another market,
which was an expansion for them, which was part number one.
Part number two, maybe the things that we've been missing,
because since the beginning we had APIs
around all those platforms.
I don't believe in the early days,
I'm talking about five years from now,
that they got, that they could really really build something
upon the converged infrastructure.
Now, if you go through the DevNet area here at Cisco Live,
you will see that I think this is the time now
for them to understand, and really build new services
on top of it, so I believe the value
for the channel is pretty obvious now, more than ever.
>> Well yeah, it's a great point,
you don't usually hear converged infrastructure
and infrastructure as code in the same conversation,
but the maturation of the platforms underneath
are bringing things together.
>> They really are, in the same way
that IT organizations are freeing up more time
to focus up the stack on automation
and added value, the same is true of the partners.
It's interesting the corollary between the two.
>> So I have a question on your act two,
so what got us here the last 10 years,
both firms were disruptors.
Cisco came in and disrupted the compute space,
it was misunderstood, "Cisco getting into servers,
"that'll never work!"
"Well, really not getting into servers,
"we're changing the game."
"Ah, okay," 10 years later.
Pure, all-flash, really created some havoc in the industry,
injected a ton of flash into the data center,
practically drove a truck through the legacy business.
Okay, so very successful.
What's act two for you guys,
what do you envision, disruptors,
are you more incrementalists,
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
>> I start, Patrick.
Probably for us, phase two
is what you heard yesterday morning,
I think Liz Anthony did a great speech
regarding Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer,
sorry for the name, this is a bit long,
but what it means is now we truly
connect the infrastructure to the application performance,
and the fact that we can place and discuss
about converged infrastructure but in the context
of what truly matters for customers,
which is application, this is the first time ever
you're going to see such amount of R&D
put into bringing the two worlds together.
So this is just the beginning,
but I think this was probably for me yesterday
one of the most important announcement ever.
And by the way, Pure is coming with this announcement,
so if you as a customer buy
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer,
you'll get everything you need to know about Pure
and if you have to move things around the storage area,
you know the tool will be doing it for you.
So we are really the two of us in this announcement,
so Patrick, if you want to?
>> No, I mean as Eric mentioned, Intersight's
important for Cisco, it's important for us,
we're very proud to be early integrators
as a third party into Intersight
to allow that simple management,
but you know, as you talk about the future,
we were viewed as disruptors
when we first came to market with flash array,
and we consider still ourselves
to be disruptors and innovators,
and the amount of our revenue
that we invest in innovation,
in what is a really focused product portfolio,
I think is showing benefits,
and you've seen the announcements
over the last six months or so
with FlashArray//C, bringing all the benefits
of flash to tier two applications,
and just the interest that that has generated is huge.
In the world of networking with NVMe,
we have a fabric in RoCEv2,
just increasing the performance for business applications
that will have fantastic implications for things like SAP,
time and performance-critical databases,
and then what we announced with direct memory
with adding SCM as a read cache onto flash array as well.
Really giving customers investment protection
for what they bought from us already,
because they can, as you well know,
Evergreen gives customers an asset
that continues to appreciate in value,
which is completely the opposite.
>> And you're both sort of embracing
that service consumption model,
I mean Cisco's becoming
a very large proportion of your business,
you guys have announced some actual straight cloud plays,
you've built an aray inside of AWS,
which is pretty innovative, so.
>> Yes, and as well as the cloud play
with Cloud Block Store in AWS,
there's Pure as a service, which takes that cloud-like
consumption model and allows a customer
to run it in their own data center
without owning the assets,
and that's really interesting,
because customers have got
used to the cloud-like consumption model,
and paying as an OpEx rather than CapEx,
and so bringing that into their own facility,
and only paying for the data you have written,
really does change the game in terms of how
they consume and think about their storage environments.
>> Patrick, we'd just love to get your viewpoint,
you've been talking to a lot of customers this week,
you said you've been checking out the DevNet zone,
for people that didn't make it to the show here,
what have they been missing,
what would their peers be telling them
in the hallway conversations?
>> There's a huge amount as we've been talking about,
there's a huge amount on automation,
and actually we see it as we go into customers,
the number of people we're now talking to
who are developers but not developers
developing business applications
but developers developing code
for managing infrastructure is key,
and you see it all around the DevNet zone.
And then, the focus on containers,
I've been talking about it for a long time,
and containers is so important
for enterprises going forward.
We have a great play in that space,
and I think as we roll forward,
the next three to five years,
containers is just going to be the important technology
that will be prevalent across enterprises large and small.
>> Dave: Yeah, we agree.
>> Eric and Patrick, thank you so much
for giving us the update,
congratulations on all the progress
and definitely look forward
to keeping an eye on your progress.
>> Thanks very much.
>> All right, Dave Vellante and I will be back
with much more here from Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona,
thanks for watching theCUBE.
(techno music)