Key to Cisco Systems Inc.’s evolving software strategy are its strategic acquisitions and partnerships with agile businesses building in artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud, and other developing technologies. While its collaborators offer fresh insights and market opportunities, Cisco’s experience and reputable product provide a powerful foundation for innovation, according to Kaustubh Das (pictured, right), vice president of product management at Cisco.

Das and Katie Colbert (pictured, left), vice president of alliances at Pure Storage Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain. They discussed the Cisco and Pure partnership,and how they’re working together to facilitate streamlined AI infrastructure in the enterprise. (* Disclosure below.)

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

Vellante: Tell us about the partnership. Where did it start? How did it evolve?

Colbert: The cultures are aligned; there’s inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of core competencies. A lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner.

Das: Pure Storage and Cisco are both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They’re both also super programmatic companies. They’ll do everything via API. From a business perspective we’re chasing common markets, very few conflicts. It’s been rooted in solid foundations.

Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a modern company built on modern software practices. Although Cisco is a veteran company, Cisco compute is relatively new. We are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering solutions to our customers with less effort from our engineers. That pace of innovation with Pure is not something we can do with every other company.

Vellante: From an engineering standpoint, [what are] you guys working on together?

Colbert: The partnership is roughly three or so years old. We have 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure, so huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence.

Das: Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But we’ve taken it further into new spaces of late. [Application centric infrastructure] is going everywhere, we’ve done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we’re doing some work in [artificial intelligence] and [machine learning], coupling Intersight, which is Cisco’s cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage’s ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs.

Vellante: What are customers asking for in terms of AI infrastructure?

Das: AI feeds on data to train itself. We just released a highly powered infrastructure, but it needs something to feed it the data. What Pure’s got with FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other.

Data scientists can get started on the laptop, on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. What we provide together is that infrastructure so that the data scientists, when they build their models, have a place to deploy them and have that life cycle running in a smooth, production-grade environment.

Vellante: Give us a roadmap for the future — what this partnership looks like down the road.

Das: We’re going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. We’re going to drive a lot more on the automation side with the automation that Pure supports. And third vector’s going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics.

Colbert: Then hybrid cloud. How do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we’ve done on-premises together to really enable the multicloud.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE