UPDATED 18:30 EDT / MAY 29 2019

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Q&A: Cisco’s own digital transformation is a lesson in empathy

If a company wants to understand its customers, it must step into their shoes. This is especially helpful in today’s era of digital transformation, where data rules and mobile lifestyles require power at the edge of computing’s network.

Cisco Systems Inc. has taken this concept to the next level. As it undergoes its own transformation from a networking appliance supplier to a software-led service provider, it’s experiencing many of the same changes and issues its customers face. Through it all, Cisco’s gained a strong perspective of industry struggles and how to streamline everyone’s operations through open-source platforms.

Vijoy Pandey (pictured), vice president and chief technology officer of cloud and distributed systems at Cisco, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Barcelona, Spain. They discussed its transition from networking to software, how it’s empathizing with its customers, and what it’s doing to grant clients’ faster, easier access to data assets (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Quinn: If something starts up that’s cloud-native, a lot is pushed onto the networks that you used to build at Google or what folks are doing at AWS. Do you see that as a longer-term trend, where enterprises are going to start moving in that direction? Or do you think enterprises are always going to have specific needs that won’t be met by the hyperscale public clouds?

Pandey: I think it’s probably the latter. The way I look at a market is it is data-driven in a different way, so whenever you have data, you have the need for compute. You have the need for a network. It comes in a variety of ways. One is just around regulation, so if you have data you need to protect, you need compute storage network. If you need a lot of insight from your data, you need to do a lot of data crunching.

For all those workloads, you need local compute and local networks, so depending on where the data is, you will see computer networking follow. In that sense, there will be a need for cloud-based access for all our enterprises, but the need for on-premises will never disappear. That’s why I think making the bet on multicloud and hybrid is the way forward.

Quinn: As you undergo the transformation [from a networking appliances to a software-defined company], how does that inform you of how to meet your customers as you start to gain empathy for what they’re going through as you go through it yourself?

Pandey: If you look at what Cisco is trying to do, it’s no different than our customers. There are a whole bunch of things happening. Duo is a company that we just acquired in the security space. There’s a whole bunch of customers we’ve acquired that are already SAS and microservices-based. Then, there are products we’ve had internally that are going through transformations themselves. Our IT department is undergoing a transformation.

So, how we approach this problem resonates very well with our customers, coming up with use cases, and saying that this is how we’ve solved the problem and these are the products we’ve built. We consume them internally. We run them as SAS products internally. Enabling that gives us a lot of credibility when we go and talk to our customers.

Miniman: You talked about Network Service Match, which is now a sandbox project under the CNCF. Explain a little about that.

Pandey: I think the NSM is just a first step … doing a couple of things. One is it’s simplifying networking so that the consumption paradigm is similar to what you see in the developer L7 layer. The way a developer would discover services at the L7 layer is the same way we would want developers to discover networking endpoints or networking services or security capabilities, so the language by which you consume must be simplified.

The second thing is we don’t want developers to think about switches, routers, subnets, etc., so how do you get multicloud and hybrid connectivity when you leave a Kubernetes part within? The moment you leave a part, all those things come in and IPs change. Subnets change; routing comes into the picture. You don’t want developers to think about it. So NSM tries to hide all that and gives you a simple discovery mechanism from point A to point B, regardless of how far you’re going. That’s the other abstraction we’re bringing in.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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