Well, I think we are going to continue to see an explosion of connectivity around the world.
We're definitely lacking enough people to grow as fast as is needed in the space, both the security
domain as well as the networking domain. There is no AI. You cannot get AI to work if you don't have
a high speed, high performance, zero loss network infrastructure. And we've been building these for
a very, very long time. And so this is nothing new for us. Cisco Silicon One is market leading
Silicon. I will give it to you this. We first launched our first Silicon One chip three and a
half years ago. And during that time, we have now 14 Silicon One chips that go from 10.8 terabits
have gone lower, all the way up to over 50 terabits per second at a single chip.
That's crazy.
Which is, which is crazy. If you've been in the space for a while, you know that that's a lot of bandwidth.
Hey everyone, it's David Bombal coming to you from Cisco Live back with Jonathan. Jonathan, great to have you back.
It's fabulous to be back.
So we last spoke at Cisco Live in Vegas, but I believe there's a big announcement,
something about a GPU company.
Right. I'm sure your audience might have heard of Nvidia, of course.
I think so.
Yeah, probably. Well, we are both of our CEOs, Chuck Robbins, as well as Jensen, announced this
week that we are joining forces to go and bring the best GPU in the market with the
best networking in the market, putting it together so that their GPUs go into our servers.
We're going to put our ethernet networking behind that. We're going to wrap it up with
what we call Cisco Validated Designs to make it easy for enterprises to go and deploy their own
AI workloads. Well, if they want to do games, that's fine too.
That's all right to interrupt you.
We put Nvidia GPUs inside of our collaboration devices, so they're everywhere.
So there's a lot of great use cases for how these two things come together.
But this specifically is to help on the enterprise data center side to really help
scale our customers. And our customers are really looking for simplicity
and putting these things together.
Yeah, I interrupted you, so I apologize. But I had to bring the gaming in.
So it's AI specifically, right?
It is definitely for AI. What we're hearing from our enterprise customers is that they want to
be able to perhaps start in the cloud with AI, but then they also want to be able to do
inference in their own data centers and at their own pace, at their own scale.
And they're really excited about this.
I think one of the reasons perhaps is they don't want their data leaking to some public place.
Perhaps is that one of the reasons?
Well, there's always concerns about that. There's a lot of, well, if you go talk to any of the major
hyperscalers today, they will tell you that they have found ways to segment your data off,
but there's still always concerns.
So one of the things I heard, and you can just correct me, something about the connections are
now going to be Ethernet.
Yes, Ethernet. I'm sure your audience has heard of it as well.
Yeah, Ethernet's great. It's been around for a little bit.
And we are the Ethernet company for all intents and purposes.
And so what people really want is an open choice around how they can go and take not only
NVIDIA GPUs, but at some point other GPUs as well, and have a common fabric amongst those.
And Ethernet is the connectivity mechanism for the entire globe.
And so they're really looking for Ethernet. Open Ethernet is really important, and Cisco's behind
that, and we're going to keep building more and more Ethernet standards as time goes on.
Just for people who might not be aware, what was used previously?
Yeah, so what we have seen is a lot of customers of GPUs traditionally have used
InfiniBand, and InfiniBand is still being used heavily. But for the most part, it can only come
from one vendor. And Ethernet comes from lots of different vendors. And we've got a lot of
competition in the Ethernet space. And customers have already made data center choices for their
Ethernet fabric. And they want to be able to take all the goodness of NVIDIA GPUs and plug it into
that infrastructure. And they can do that. Whether you're using a Nexus switch or an ACI ecosystem,
we can make sure that it all works seamlessly. I heard you, I think you said it on stage,
something about there's no AI without a network. Can you just correct the statement? And then
what does that mean? Well, there is no AI. You cannot get AI to work if you don't have a high
speed, high performance, zero loss network infrastructure. And we've been building these
for a very, very long time. And so this is nothing new for us. And we want to make sure that customers
are very aware you can run AI workloads across Ethernet. There's a little bit of what I would
call fear and certainty and doubt out there that Ethernet is fit for purpose for AI workloads,
but it absolutely is great. We've got large hyperscalers deploying very large GPU clusters
using Ethernet in the back end. And in fact, Bloomberg did a survey over the last month.
For those who are using Ethernet for their AI workloads in the enterprise,
66% of them are using Cisco. And the next closest competitor to us, 3%. That's a big difference.
So we feel pretty good. Now the GPUs go into the Cisco UCS servers. Don't understand that, right?
You got it. You got all the names down. This is great. So looking forward, GPUs maybe in other
places or is it specifically for a server product? So today it is going to be on the server product.
We are looking at putting DPUs into other products. DPUs. We'll talk more about that later.
Okay. We'll do another show. That'd be great. But we also see the potential for taking AI
inference to the edge. And so there's stay tuned for that. If you might be interested in that,
reach out, let us know your use cases because we are hearing from many customers that there's
interest in that area. Cisco, I don't know if everyone's aware of that. I mean, they might have
seen like chips like these things, the 9300X if I've got it right, but Cisco have a silicon one chip
as well. Is that correct? It's a bit bigger than that one. A little bit, I'm sure. Yeah, a little
bigger than that one. So Cisco silicon one is market leading silicon. I will give it to this.
We first launched our first silicon one chip three and a half years ago. And during that time,
we have now 14 silicon one chips that go from 10.8 terabits have gone lower,
all the way up to over 50 terabits per second at a single chip. That's crazy. Which is crazy. If
you've been in the space for a while, you know that that's a lot of bandwidth. Not only that has
industry leading amount of power per 100 gig port, which is how we measure power on a chip
and significantly lower than our the next nearest competition is something we're really proud about.
And if you care about saving money, or if you care about sustainability, it's a great thing to look
after. So how is that different to say like a Intel CPU or the GPUs from Nvidia? Can you just like,
how does it work together with this announcement? Or is that something else? There's two things to
that. So the Nvidia GPUs are going into the UCI servers, you're going to have Cisco networking
infrastructure, which can use Nexus, which is predominantly what is deployed in the ethernet.
And Nexus can operate in two modes, it can operate in an EVPN BGP mode, or it can operate in an ACI
fabric mode. So if you want to do real intent driven based things, and your UCS servers will
work in either one of those modes with GPUs in them. We also have for the very hyperscale
side of things where they deploy Cisco 8000. And the Cisco 8000 has silicon one Nexus also has
silicon one. So you get the advantages, regardless of which path you choose to go down. But the
hyperscalers traditionally have gone down the the Cisco 8000 path, which started with silicon
one and now silicon one is everywhere. Silicon was on our campus infrastructure now as well.
I've heard this term digital experience monitoring. What is that about? I'm glad you asked. It is
something we're really excited about. You know, I've been in this networking space for for almost
30 years, believe it or not. I've got to say that I remember you said it on stage. So to interrupt
you again, you made your first VoIP call 25 years ago. Yes. And you wrote a good book about it,
which I've read even those long time ago. It's good for insomnia. You know, it's 100% cure rate
for insomnia. So if you have that, it's a great book to get a little out of date now, but still
some true principles in there. So digital experience monitoring, if you go back to 30 years ago,
one of the things that we've really been trying to solve for is what is the user experience? What
is the application experience? And how are things experiencing the infrastructure? And it's been
really hard to know and like, okay, well, we're having loss over here, but is it impacting anyone
negatively? Yeah. And so this is a big reason why we acquired Thousand Eyes three and a half years
ago and why we've continued to add more into this observability framework by acquiring a CDN, Sam
knows and others. And now we have taken Thousand Eyes integrated into our catalyst switching
portfolio, our catalyst routing portfolio, Meraki, WebEx, AppD. And now we announced it's
integrated into our Cisco secure access, which is our SSE stack. So you can know what your users,
your applications, your things are experiencing, and you can know where they're having a challenge.
Is it the local Wi-Fi network? Is it the last mile? Is it perhaps somewhere in the middle,
two or three hops away? And then you can know how you need to reroute your traffic or fix
that experience. And we're really excited about where that's going. For my audience,
very big interest in cybersecurity, ethical hacking, not talking about the bad guys,
but like how to protect security is a problem. Cisco doing something about it? Oh, absolutely.
So think of us as not only an internet data company, but we are the secure networking company.
And when you're pulling these things together, it's really important for it to be a seamless
experience. And so we announced last June the Cisco networking cloud. We have the Cisco security
cloud, but in reality, those clouds are, from a customer perspective, those clouds are integrated.
So if you look at, for example, a Meraki dashboard where you can now manage your catalyst switches,
you can monitor your catalyst wireless, and of course, you get the full Meraki experience with
all of the other equipment. We have seamlessly integrated in the security elements from Jeetu's
portfolio. So the firewall that Jeetu has built is integrated into the catalyst routing portfolio.
It's integrated into the Meraki MX portfolio. We get threat detection data from Talos, which is
the premier aspect there. And those signatures are pushed into all of the Cisco networking
devices. And you can even provision your SASE stack directly from the Meraki dashboard. We've
integrated catalyst SD-WAN, the premier SD-WAN, number one SD-WAN on the planet, can now be
easily integrated into the Cisco secure access technology, our SSE stack. So there's a lot of
great things that are happening because people are more likely to secure their infrastructure
if it's simple and if it's easy to go and do. So we talked about that last time, right, where
the complexity was a big problem. So we're on this journey to simplify more and more,
make the user interfaces better, it sounds like. Absolutely. Well, we want to make sure that the
workflow is simple. We've all become very attuned to in our personal lives, having really great UI.
And this is one of the things that Jeetu and I and Liz spent a lot of time talking about is how do we
dramatically simplify the user experience so it's easy to deploy agents, so it's easy to understand
what all this data is trying to tell you and get proposed solutions for you so that you can just
click the yes or no button on them. You mentioned data and it was also in the keynote, something
along the lines that Cisco is a data company. Yes. Well, if you think about how we can go and
transform these digital experiences, that requires data. AI requires data. Yeah. And so what I don't
think people really appreciate is the size and the scale of the company and then what that means
from a data perspective. No, I don't think so. We have visibility into over a billion endpoints
around the world. Well, that means that there's a billion endpoints that we see from a telemetry
spread every single day. And so we know when school's in session because there's more endpoints,
we know when school's out of session because there's fewer endpoints. And people are giving
us the right, it's all anonymized, we're not using the data maliciously, it's in our
code of ethics. But what that means is that with the enterprise's permission is we can add value
based on that data. So we see over a billion endpoints. We have tens of millions of agents
deployed. We're running billions of tests every single day to understand what's happening across
public SASs, what's happening across the public internet, what's happening across the private
infrastructure when the customer asks us to do that. But we're able to then correlate all this
information together and provide seamless outcomes. And that's where that digital
experience monitoring. So we really wanted to emphasize or still want to emphasize the fact
that we are an internet data company. And then of course, when we get to the point where we actually
close the spunk acquisition, that's only going to bolster that even more. And then through AI,
they can be leveraged to better protect, better monitor, right? Provide better experiences,
provide better security. The use cases and the outcomes that we can help generate for our
customers is really unlimited. So I'm going to ask you a personal question. You wrote that book,
First VoIP Call 25 years ago. I remember my first VoIP call as well, a long time ago. It was amazing,
going from traditional telephony to VoIP, change the world, change our age. But this is another
wave, AI. So if you were starting today, what would you advise yourself to do? Any sort of
looking perhaps forward for yourself or for the next generation or people trying to move into this
space? What would you advise? So I think you need to be an expert in some technology field,
but also understand that AI is going to fundamentally change things. So if you look
at early in the career developers coming in, they're using AI to actually accelerate their
ability to add value and get to full productivity and whatever they are. So I remember I would go
and we'd have more senior engineers and I would go and just pester them all day long with questions.
If I had an AI tool that could just give me questions, answers to my questions,
I would be asking it 50 times a day. And you wouldn't feel dumb when they look down on you,
right? I remember those days. Yeah. And nobody likes being uncomfortable. You might miss out on
having a lot of great friendships that I started then and I still have now. But the point is,
it really can help accelerate the curve to learning. So I'm a big fan of that part of it
and things where you can augment knowledge. But also, there's new things like prompt engineering
and understand how to tune the system, how to ask questions to get the appropriate response back.
There's going to be really important. And I just think you're going to see more and more of those
jobs moving forward. So AI, if you were starting today, you look seriously at AI, some kind of AI?
A hundred percent. I'll tell you what I told my kids is just like it's important to learn
a foreign language when you're in school. It's also important to learn basic coding
principles. Even if you decide you don't want to be a software engineer, when you go into
the workforce, even if you're going to go to a nonprofit, having that experience means that
you're going to be more valuable. It means you'll be able to ask good questions because everybody
needs a website. Everybody got a database. Everybody has customers. So you're going to
be able to go and really make sure that you're making the right decisions to help you do whatever
job it is that you want. In fact, I have a my brother-in-law was in the military, was in
Afghanistan multiple times. He has an economics degree and masters. Ten years ago, he went and
got his computer science degree just so he could ask better questions at work. That's amazing. So
AI coding, like Python or something, learn how to code because it really opens up the world,
doesn't it? And then if you understand how to interact with AI, it's going to accelerate
your career. 100%. In my opinion. And what about like networking security? Still good places to go?
Well, I think we are going to continue to see an explosion of connectivity around the world.
We're definitely lacking enough people to grow as fast as is needed in this space, both in the
security domain as well as in the networking domain. Just kind of raw numbers. I like to
throw numbers out there. There's still 3 billion people around the world that are either unconnected
or underserved, which means that they either have no connectivity or they don't have enough
connectivity to actually enter the digital economy. So that's important. So we need to connect three,
that's three-eighths of the planet that is under- People forget that, right?
Underserved or unconnected completely. The second thing, if you look at IoT,
it took a while to get going, but Cisco is the largest mobile IoT provider in the world. We have
now 250 million mobile IoT connections with 60 carrier partners around the world. These are cellular
connections, but still to this day, less than 10% of all cars in the world are connected.
And by 2030, 100% of all cars in the world are connected. And we sell about 60,
well, we collectively, the world, so about 60 million cars a year. And that goes down,
it goes up, but around 60 million. So think about that, just cars. I'm not talking about alarm
system, I'm talking about smart cities. Just cars is going to add a significant number of vehicles,
close to 400 million vehicles in the next six years. In other words, there's huge growth still
to come. Huge growth, huge problems still need to be solved around connectivity.
Jonathan, I really want to thank you for sharing not just the technical visionary stuff, but also
inspiring people. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. True pleasure. Thanks for having me.