The cloud: Is it as cost-saving as some people claim? Though he admits it to be a controversial opinion, Bill Shields, senior marketing manager at Cisco Systems Inc., says no. While cloud does offer flexibility, it doesn’t actually save the customer as much money as it purports, he stated.

“[With Amazon] you still have to manage all of the stuff … but you don’t own the infrastructure,” Shields said. Nevertheless, there are a lot of things that can be done with storage and automation with few staff members.

Speaking on the operational benefits of managing networking in particular via cloud tools, Shields was interviewed by Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@jefffrick), hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during BigDataNYC 2016 in New York, NY.

Differences that matter

Cisco is now offering a new system for hyper-convergence called HyperFlex, which unifies compute, storage and networking. Competitors of Cisco offer similar tools, but there are some big differences, Shields said.

“The majority of the other guys are sending a box, not a solution, and you have to figure out the networking. We figured it out [for you] using the same tools, so you can manage hyper-convergence just like your other infrastructure,” he stated, adding that his company also stands out with its addition of disaggregation, even at the hyper-convergence level. It allows you to add compute nodes separate from the storage nodes.

Competitors also have a hard time matching tools such as a server profile, which allows you to make a change and send it out to hundreds of servers. As a result, Cisco certainly stands out, and it shows at the trade shows, Shields said.

Earlier in his career, Shields said he grew hardened to angry customer rants at trade shows. But since becoming an employee at Cisco, that no longer happens. Not even once, he said.

“That’s amazing to me. It’s reassurance that I’m in the right place,” Shields said. “Cisco does things differently, and those differences matter.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataNYC 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE