As Cisco Systems Inc. talks with its customers, it is getting a clear picture of information-technology preferences and an overwhelming sentiment in favor of a networking environment that mixes cloud computing with on-premises operations.

One Cisco executive recently noted in an interview that 90% of its customers intended to deploy a multicloud structure while keeping the Kubernetes control plane on-prem.

“One of the things that we’re seeing more in our customers is they don’t have one cloud; they have multiple clouds for multiple purposes,” said Reinhardt Quelle (pictured), principal engineer of multicloud integrations, Cloud Platforms and Solutions Group, at Cisco. “For most of our enterprise customers, it’s not an ‘or,’ it’s not on-prem or the cloud, it’s not containers or physical machines. It’s ‘and,’ running all of the above.”

Quelle spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, at SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed what it means to bring cloud innovation on-prem, how Cisco is driving network programmability, and the challenge of dealing with a rapidly expanding enterprise infrastructure (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Leveraging automation

To meet customer desires, Cisco’s mantra is to bring cloud innovation on-prem, according to Quelle. What does that actually mean?

“It’s taking these advantages of automation and observability and code review that are just normal practice in software development and applying them to infrastructure,” Quelle explained. “As the edges get blurry, as we move workloads from one place to the other, all of the things that Cisco does around managed networks, programmable networks, secure networks, all become even more important.”

Because many services in the cloud rely on automation, Cisco has been re-tooling its portfolio to accommodate network programmability. Customers who want to control Kubernetes on-prem will expect a programmable environment.

“In every case, the programmability of the infrastructure as far down as you can go becomes paramount,” Quelle said. “A big part of what Cisco has been doing across our entire portfolio is ensure that every piece of it, from networking to storage and security, is programmable and drivable through automation.”

Meeting workload requirements

A key element as the hybrid structure evolves is the way that workloads now define the requirements needed to operate effectively. An example of how this is playing out can be found in the use case of one Cisco banking customer, according to Quelle.

“They’ve got a mobile-first application, but the data that application is accessing is in the mainframe,” Quelle said. “It hasn’t moved in 10 years, and it’s not going to move anytime soon. So, you put the application next to the data that it needs.”

The evolution of networking has become a challenge for major providers such as Cisco, which must keep pace with the exponential growth of multiple interfaces and mushrooming applications. In earlier days, there was a machine with one Internet Protocol address and a singular network interface. This gave way to virtual machines with multiple addresses and network interfaces.

“Now, Kubernetes has an IP address per application,” Quelle noted. “The networking space is exploding as we move up, and we now have a network connectivity and management problem that’s an order of magnitude more complicated than it was before. Networking underpins everything that we do.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* 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