Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] When you're talking about, um, you know, how is the future internet going to be different from, from today's internet, that, that is really the f-the fundamental point of, of today. 0:13 Um, because we can't keep doing things the same way. Um, it's... 'cause it's not just about, um, the different experiences, it's about scale, and scale changes everything. 0:31 [upbeat music] Welcome to The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation with your host, Peggy Smedley. 0:46 Hello, listeners, and welcome to today's special edition of The Peggy Smedley Show. I'm your host, Peggy Smedley. Cisco is out to build a new internet, and they don't take that responsibility lightly. 0:59 So on Wednesday, Cisco made its big announcement. I attended the event for Cisco and their Cisco Silicon One silicon architecture, and let me tell you, these guys are serious about their new product. 1:13 The words internet for the future were emboldened all over this venue. But really, if you think about it, this type of manifesto, building a new internet, is in Cisco's blood. 1:28 Cisco was a huge player in building today's internet. They feel an intense obligation to continue that legacy as we as a society grow into the internet for the future. 1:41 I'm on board with this, and I think they can actually do it. I can see so much potential in Cisco's new architecture, which takes a lot of complexity out of networks and network operations. 1:55 Complexity is one of the things I hear about all the time as a hurdle to IoT growth. If Cisco can really deliver on this, it could help direct the path for future networks and the future connected world. 2:11 So without further ado, let's hear from two key thought leaders directly. 2:16 First, I'll be speaking with Jonathan Davidson, Senior VP and GM, Service Provider Business at Cisco, and then Bill Gardner, Senior VP and GM, Optical Systems and Optics Group at Cisco. 2:31 Jonathan, thank you for being with us. So I'm, I'm gonna quickly start, and I wanna, I wanna thank you. What a wonderful job you did today of really explaining everything, so I, I thought it was absolutely amazing. 2:42 So thank you for helping us understand what Cisco's doing. I thought it was fabulous. So let's start. How will the internet for the future be different than today's internet, as you were describing today? 2:54 And then I would love for you to s-talk about what are some of the applications you see that it's gonna enable. Absolutely. Well, well, thank you very much for, uh, for coming, and thanks for, for, uh, the kind words. 3:05 You know, I always, uh, I always like to say, it's, it's pretty easy to explain what we're doing when we have such a phenomenal team with such phenomenal products. 3:13 And, uh, and it, it truly is a, a humbling experience to be able to represent hundreds of people over so many years of work, uh, that have touched, uh, and made today possible. 3:23 You know, when you, when you're talking about, um, you know, how is the future internet going to be different from, from today's internet, that, that is really the, the fundamental point of, of today. 3:34 Um, because we can't keep doing things the same way. Um, it's... 'cause it's not just about, um, the different experiences, it's about scale, and scale changes everything. 3:45 I like to think about, you know, if my seven-year-old and I, if we want to bake a dozen cookies, that's pretty easy to do. 3:51 But if someone asks us to bake 1,200 cookies, like, we have a problem, but we could probably get it done. But if someone asks us to bake 1.2 million cookies, like, we have to rethink everything. 4:02 You have to rethink, "Where do I get the chocolate chips from? Where can I find ovens that can help me?" And we have the same problem with the internet. 4:07 We are getting to the point where we, of course, have been growing and scaling. Um, I have, I have a, I have a spreadsheet that tracks it back to 1982, um, but we're now at... 4:17 We're getting to the knee of the curve, where when you're scaling something that's already humongous, you have a problem of n-not being able to throw people at the issue anymore. 4:27 You have to be able to rethink the fundamental DNA of every single component, and you have to make sure that you are able to build software that is simple and scales and can be automated. 4:42 You have to make sure that you're, uh, enabling people to take advantage of that automation, um, and that, that innovation by going and building cloud-based tools because we're all used to doing that now. 4:54 And so we've got that with what we call the, the Cisco Crosswork Qualification, uh, Engine, which is a new tool that I was describing on how to go and literally help you test your products to get it into your network rapidly. 5:07 Um, one of the things that isn't very well known is every service provider network builds it differently. They build their networks differently. They use different features. They use different capabilities. 5:16 Um, and so we, so the... 5:17 everything's a little bit custom, which is okay because everyone needs to differentiate amongst themselves, but that means that the burden for taking that innovation and putting it in their network is on them. 5:28 And what we want to do is we want to help them take the innovation and put it in their network faster by helping them decrease the amount of time it takes to innovate, and we're doing that through cloud-based services and through automation, and this is something that we've had in the works as well for, for several years. 5:42 I'm kind of curious about why everything's a little different because you would think that we... there are some things that should be the same, but why does everybody think they hit... feel the need to do it different? 5:53 Are there some things that can be the same, or have we always tried to make things so much harder by having to do everything different?I- is, is that part of the challenge that you see that because everybody wants to do it different has made it even more harder for themselves and the businesses they're trying to create? 6:10 Well, we're all, we're all, uh, we're all unique human individuals. 6:13 We all have our own desires and needs for what we think we want from the internet, and so we look for our, our service providers to give us the experience that we're looking for, whether it's, oh, it's bundling it with a triple play with my mobile phone, or I want to get this specific content. 6:29 They're always looking for how they can service their customers. 6:32 And so since we're all unique, all the billions of people around the world, the service providers have to cater to the different unique attributes of what their customers want. 6:40 And so, yeah, it would be great if everything was exactly the same, but that'd also be pretty boring, too, and we wouldn't get the differentiation of services that we really wanted at the end of the day. 6:49 And so all this comes down to what does the consumer really want, and the con- the consumer wants, the service provider delivers to them, and what the service provider needs, we help them with that. 6:59 And then today, when we look at the consumer, consumers wants everything in every size, shape, color, and it's become really difficult because we've changed so much in the way we want things streamed and how quickly and how fast the supply chain logistics, all of those things have changed. 7:13 Is that also a part of it? Because you talked about the silicon, the s- the, the software, the optics, everything- Yeah... coming together. All of that is playing a big role. Absolutely. 7:23 And it, it, uh, taking it back to the consumer and what Chuck was talking about with 5G, you know, depending upon where you are in the US, you have 5G. 7:31 Uh, but if you go to other countries in South Korea and in Japan, you're getting 5G in a, in much, much more broader areas because they started a little bit earlier, and they've been moving a little bit faster. 7:41 But that said, being able to have this, this phenomenal amount of bandwidth directly to where you are means that it's not just about what you want, it's about where you want it and what you're going to be able to get access to, and that's going to put additional pressure on the infrastructure. 7:57 So it's not that I want to watch 4K television at home, um, my seven-year-old wants to watch 4K television in the back of the car while we're driving to Lake Tahoe to go skiing, right? 8:08 And we want, like, we want to be able to provide that experience because it also provides differentiation. 8:12 So who can get there first can help drive the, the behavior of who's actually going to purchase that, that capability. How... 8:18 Talk to me a little bit about how this is going to help companies reduce cost and complexity, because I think that's a powerful statement. Yeah. 8:25 So first of all, when you're moving to higher speeds, so this is a very powerful device. 8:31 Even if you look at the smallest device that we had, if I told you you had to pick up a 10 terabit router five years ago, you would just look at me and laugh- Mm-hmm... 8:40 because it's not possible for any human being on the planet to pick up a device because it was almost as tall as me and, and weighed thousands and thousands of pounds. 8:48 You can go today, walk in the other room, and you can pick up a 10 terabit router, and you could stick it in your suitcase if you really wanted to. It's crazy, right? Right. 8:56 I'm asking you to not do that because they're really expensive. [laughs] Um, but you could do that. 9:00 Uh, and so, so what that means is not only is it a dramatically lower amount of power, um, but also I'm actually able to put them and build my network in different ways so it can be more resilient because there's nothing more frustrating than clicking on reload or clicking on download the movie and it's not there. 9:18 Like it's, it's, it's kind of like, I always think of networks are a little bit like elevators. You don't notice the elevators until it's not working, and then you notice that, oh, I don't like this elevator. 9:27 I have to take the stairs. It's unpleasant. It's the same thing with, you know, I click, I'm watching my show. All of a sudden my show's not working. Okay, why is it not working? I'm unhappy. 9:37 Uh, and we need to be able to, um, to make sure that that never happens, and so that's not just about shrinking, lowering costs, lowering power, it's also about making sure that the network is always available as well. 9:49 Is there going to be one industry over another that's going to benefit from this as we, or is it all industries that are going to see the, this being a game changer? 9:57 Well, it's really going to start with the service providers and the massive, the scale, you know- Yeah... data centers or, or the web providers. 10:04 This is where we're going to be able to take advantage of this technology first because they need it the most. 10:08 Uh, and, and there are companies out there that are waiting literally for this to come off the production line so they can start installing it into their infrastructure because there is an insatiable appetite for, for bandwidth and applications and services- Mm-hmm 10:21 ... that, um, that it's just too expensive to do it any other way. And so this will help lower all, lower the cost per, per bit dramatically. 10:30 Um, and then it also will lower the operating costs, one from a power, but also because of this new common layer of software across multiple portfolio families, which means that, um, I'll explain a little bit of the, the technology here to you. 10:44 One of the challenges is that there are lots of different pieces of silicon that are out there and, and their purpose had been purpose-built with different engines. Right. 10:56 And so this is what Eyal was talking about is if you have a mechanic for a Jeep and you ask the mechanic to go then and work on a, a Honda, they have a major learning curve, right? 11:07 Obviously they're both internal combustion engines, but there's still a major learning curve to go from this vendor to this vendor or this model to this model. 11:14 And we all, Eyal was explaining was that you now have the capability to have a single engine that can work in many different places of the network, and, and what that means is that for the operations personnel, and there's tens of thousands of those people at each and every single major tier one service provider. 11:32 Um, not just people driving around in trucks, but people working inside the data center, people working in the network operations center. 11:37 These are vast organizations, and they have had the complexity of having to go and understand how to work on Jeeps and Hondas and Toyotas and all those things, and they now have the opportunity to have... 11:48 just understand one piece of silicon and how that works and how it's going to behave in their network so they can offer more consistent services and also lower the cost to operate the network. 11:57 So how is that going to change the future of work overall? 12:00 Because I think that's going to have a greater impact when we talk about inno- innovation and we talk about the challenges of the future of work within many industries- Right... that are struggling already. 12:08 So this, in conjunction with, with automation, they go, they go hand in hand. You heard many people on the panel talking about software-defined networking, right? 12:17 This is moving from where I have to go and write software every single time I want to do something new to where the, the network itself can react to requests being made in the human language, like I want- Mm-hmm... 12:30 to connect from here to here, and then the network figures out what to do instead of having a human going and manually provisioning every single point along the way. 12:40 So to get from where you, wherever your house is to wherever your content is, there's dozens of places along the network, and you think about some person having to go and manually touch those anytime they want to install a new device or a new line card, or anytime a customer wants a new service, a new network service, 12:58 that's, that's very painful. 12:59 So are we talking now overall the ideal, uh, ability now of testing and security is so greatly enhanced in the ability now which we talk on how we're disrupting the way we think of the internet overall? 13:12 So you think about, this is why the trustworthy systems is so important. 13:15 This is why it's a pillar of, of what we discussed today, specifically around the, the Cisco 8000 Series, um, because this is trusted infrastructure. I do my banking. 13:26 Every business in the world is doing business over, over the internet or over a private IP network, and these devices, I have customers with literally hundreds of thousands of network elements that they have to manage, uh, in one network. 13:40 So how, how do you know that someone hasn't put a piece of software, um, and maybe not even maliciously? They just put a piece of software on that device, but then they leave. 13:51 Two years later, that piece of software could still be running. Do you want it running? Do you know that it's running? How can you ensure that you understand the trust posture of your entire infrastructure? 14:02 So we wanted to make it really easy, and the way that we felt it would be easy to do would be to build it into the software natively and offer a cloud service that comes along with it they don't have to pay extra for, that will be able to tell you that, yep, that hardware is legitimate hardware. 14:16 That software is the software you want to be running, and by the way, the software additionally that's running on it that you wrote is part of your whitelisted software, which means it's okay to be running on that platform as well. 14:27 How will this change the way you communicate or work with certain partners and customers that you did before or that you aren't, and you envision new companies working with you? 14:38 So we think that there's a huge opportunity not only for our, our partners to participate in this as well, uh, but for our customers, it means we're going to have an even more, a, a more tighter relationship with them, which means that we will be able to proactively tell them if they want us to. 14:52 We'll be able to proactively tell them, uh, if there's things in their network that they should be looking into, like, "Hey, we really recommend you upgrade the software on this particular platform, uh, because we've seen other customers who have your similar configuration and your similar hardware are running into issues for these following reasons." 15:08 Right? So that's an opportunity where the more data they share with us, the more we can help them. 15:13 So do we look at overall, like this is now potentially eliminating what might be happening in, in maybe nefarious characters trying to, to e- engage in, in the system at all, in the network at all? 15:29 Do, are, are you helping them fend off things that they might not be seeing as well? So this, this protects the infrastructure itself. 15:36 Obviously, there are still bad actors that traverse this infrastructure, get to your laptop or your PC or, you know, things of that nature, so this doesn't stop that. 15:45 What this, what, what this helps prevent is to ensure that the critical infrastructure is not being compromised, i.e., someone's not getting into that infrastructure and diverting traffic in a way that you don't want it to be diverted. 15:57 So there's so, so much going on. So what's the feedback been? You said you started in October. You had some with some of your better customers. You didn't reveal who they were, which was interesting. 16:06 You can tell us if you want, but then you said, uh, in the new year you're going to be kind of rolling this out? Yes. 16:12 So, uh, in the first quarter of, uh, of calendar '20, uh, we'll be shipping the majority of the platforms, and, uh, and we ex- we expect it to be widely adopted by the service provider and the web scale customers. 16:26 Is there any challenges you foresee in what's going on? I know the competition will be here, and they'll be saying, "Ah," and challenging you- Yeah... on things that you said. Yeah. 16:34 We just thought we'd take a very different approach with this launch, uh, in that typically when we launch a product in the past, you would've launched it six or eight months in advance, um, and, and then you wait for it to ship. 16:45 Um, we took a very different approach. 16:46 The software that I talked about, iOS XR7, we started shipping that in August, and it's already in production networks around the world, uh, on other platforms that are not the Cisco 8000. 16:55 So that, the software's, has been shipping for, for many months now. The hardware, um, we actually, we're not, we've been shipping it to EFTs, early field trial customers, long before October, so very, very early. 17:07 Um, we shipped it to paying customers in October, okay? This is a very different approach than anyone in the industry has done and because we wanted to make sure that everyone understood that this is real. This is now. 17:19 You don't have to wait for it because we think that the leapfrog game is over. You know, if you go back, you know, 15, 20 years, it's like Cisco launches a new platform, and we're the best. 17:30 Someone else launches a new platform six to 12 months later, and now they're faster. 17:34 Um, we know that platforms that our competitors have talked about, they launched six to eight months ago, that they still haven't shipped, are inferior to the platform that we're shipping right now. 17:45 So we think this whole leapfrogging back and forth is over because we took the time. 17:51 We started with a completely clean sheet on the silicon, on the system, and also on the software, and-You know, you heard it directly from, from Dan at Facebook, not many people have the patience to spend five years of R&D dollars and then wait till you get into customers' networks and then launch. 18:09 Uh, it's hard to hold back the horses when they wanna be free, uh, but we decided to take a different approach this time, and I think it's, it's, uh, it's proven very well. 18:17 We've seen a lot of manufacturers hold off trying to get into what we call this whole innovation, di- digital innovation. 18:25 Do we see now, you know, when they see that now you're talking about the internet for the future, that they'll start seeing maybe this is the time, that we, we can't wait anymore, we have to start? 18:36 Do you think that this will start helping them understand this is the right time? I, I may be talking to the wrong people, but I don't talk to anyone who's waiting on, on, uh, on digital transformation. 18:45 I think everybody is pretty much all in. It's more- They're all in. They're-... how fast can I get there? And this will help them with, with that transition. 18:52 And looking at that, with that, are the, are companies that you're dealing with now, are they seeing where they have to go, where they've gotta take...? 18:58 'Cause you're working with Disney and AT&T and Comcast and Facebook, and they're looking, you know, five, 10, 15 years out. Right. 19:06 And so those kind of companies, when you're working with them, are they seeing what the bigger challenges are going to be from a global basis, like sustainability, resiliency- Yeah... 19:15 and how you bring all these things together? Yeah. Ab- absolutely. 19:18 And, and, and that's one of the great things about being in, in this business is I think most service providers and web scale companies, we're actually... 19:24 You have to have a long time horizon, 'cause it takes a long time- Mm-hmm... to build these products. Like, we're not a, we're not an app developer where you can crank out a new product in 30 days or 60 days. 19:33 This is critical infrastructure and it takes significant time to build. And so, uh, I'll give you an example. 19:39 This, uh, this past, uh, um, year at Davos, our CEO, Chuck, was talking about how by 2030 we're gonna make sure that all of the products that Cisco sells, 100% of them, are, are actually going to be recycled or make sure that it doesn't go into landfill, right? 19:56 This is, this is a huge statement to make in this relatively short period of time to completely modify the supply chain. 20:04 Not only do we wanna sell something to our customers, we wanna ship it to them, but at some point in time we wanna make sure that that equipment is pulled if when you... 20:12 When they decide they don't wanna use it anymore, we wanna make sure that it's not just tossed into the trash, right? Because it's actually better for the environment that way. 20:18 So we, this whole industry is, is moving in that direction and we're taking a leadership position there. I know you have to go, but one last thing. 20:24 If you had to give one statement right now on all this to wrap it up, what would you say here's, here was the most exciting thing that came out of today's announcement? 20:32 You know, I think there are so many exciting things. I think the, the overall commentary that, and belief that this is the future for the internet, I think tells it all. 20:44 We've had a great run of this kind of first generation of the internet, but we had to rethink everything and we've, we have been doing that. 20:51 So to be able to, to be able to share that with the world beyond the customers that we've been talking to for the last few years is, is a, is a great compelling moment. 21:00 And you saw the number of customers who are willing to go up on stage and talk about our shared and joint vision for where things are. 21:05 And that, to me, is the most powerful thing, is the fact that customers are willing to step out of their very busy days and their very busy schedules, fly here to spend a few minutes to spend time with everyone in the press and analysts to share our, our joint shared vision. 21:20 Well, it was a big day. It was exciting. Jonathan, thank you so much- Yeah. Thank you... for spending time with me. I appreciate it. Appreciate it as well. Thank you. 21:26 Okay, listeners, that's all the time we have for this segment, but stick around. We'll be back after a quick short break. 21:32 But remember, you can check out our website at connectedworld.com or The Peggy Smedley Show website at peggysmedley show.com. Or most importantly, you can tweet at me at connectedwmag. 21:43 And remember, this is The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. And remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. We'll be right back. [upbeat music]
