- What's happening is
our defenses for security have gotten very isolated, and the attacks have gotten
very, very coordinated, and it should be the other way around. - How many people are not
connected in the world? - Three billion out of eight billion. So a billion are totally unconnected. Two billion are underserved. - The biggest thing that people have underestimated about AI. (relaxed electronic music) - Hey, everyone, it's
David Bombal coming to you from Cisco Live with two
very, very special guests. Jonathan, Jeetu, welcome. - Thanks for having us.
- Great to be here. - It's great. Yeah, great to talk to you about these exciting
announcements that you've made, but before we get to
that, CCIE, is that right? - Yes, 2560, not recerted. - But the point I'm making is that you've been down this road, right? Very technical on networking. You also wrote a book. - I did. I co-authored a book called
"Voice Over IP Fundamentals." It is great for teaching
you about the fundamentals of voiceover IP and actually
also cures insomnia. (David laughs) - Cures insomnia, I like that. (both laugh) - When I was doing research
for this interview, what I really liked about that is, I mean, showing my age here, the world I believe
changed with voice over IP. And Cisco, were obviously
on the forefront of that, and I believe something big's happening. So, for people who haven't
seen the announcements, perhaps you can tell us what's happening with networking, and, you
know, why is it so exciting? - Yeah, so there is a
lot of exciting things in networking happening right now, and I'll give you a few things. First of all, our
customers lives are getting so much more complicated. If you go into the Wayback Machine when we had applications
running on a server, and then they went virtual, and then you're not sure
which server they were on. And then we went to public cloud, and now they're in containerization, and that's not including now the fact that people can work
from home or the office. So just the infrastructure
itself is getting more complex because of way software is written has fundamentally changed, and that is complicated
networking as well. So how do you know where
the applications are if there's a problem? Is it my Wi-Fi connection? Is it the service provider? What's actually going on? And so what we wanted to do and what we've been getting requested is like just make this simple for me. I just want the outcome
of the connectivity to be there to happen. And if something bad
happens, tell me where, what, and how I fix it. So this vision that we're painting is what we're calling the
Cisco Networking Cloud, which is really a vision
for having consistency between on-premise management,
the unified experience with the cloud-based management as well. And we think most people, most businesses are gonna move towards
cloud-based management, but we're always going to
have on-premise management for regulatory reasons. There obviously are government agencies that really need to have
on-premise networks, but we want to have a consistency
of the user experience across each of those various aspects. - I've heard this term
quite a few times, platform. Is that what we're talking about? - We're talking about a platform. And so glad you called that out. The platform, and this is why Jeetu's team and my team work very
closely with common UI/UX, whether you're provisioning security or whether you're provision network. You know, if it's connected,
it needs to be protected. And we wanna make sure that you have consistency of experience, consistent policy across each of your various technology domains. - I mean, life's-
- I feel very connected to you right now 'cause I'm
using the same lines you are, so that's great. - So we gotta talk about security as well because that's like a major thing. We've got networking, getting complex. I mean, the old, old days,
showing my age again, when things were a lot more simple. Networking is complex, but
security landscape is... I've heard you say this. There's no single company, is that right, that has large market share? - Yes. You know, I used to use the stat, which I was corrected about
today, which is wrong. So I used to say there's
3,500 vendors in this market. - [David] Yeah, that's
the one I heard, yeah. - Right, and no one has any
kind of dominant market share. We actually did some fact checking. It's 15,200 vendors in the market.
- Oh, wow. And no one has any dominant market share. And on average, people have
between 50 to 70 products in every company. And when you start thinking
about what the issues are, it's like that's 50 to 70
different policy engines. That's 50 to 70 different
cracks in the system. That's 50 to 70 different places where contention can happen in policy. And so, you know, what's
happening is our defenses for security have gotten very isolated, and the attacks have gotten
very, very coordinated, and it should be the other way around. You should actually break down the attack and make sure that the
defenses are coordinated, and that can only happen if
you actually have a platform. So like Jonathan has the
Cisco Networking Cloud. We actually announced last
year the Cisco Security Cloud, and we are making some meaningful
kind of strides forward over here in our
announcements we're making around what we're doing with AI, what we're doing with,
you know, secure access, and the experience really
matters in security. Efficacy really matters in security, and economics really matter in security. And we will make sure that
we address all those three. - So I mean, when you talk about like a networking cloud platform, is it something that's hosted in the cloud that manages all the different
types of network devices? Or how does it like... What is it in practice? - Yeah, so it's a cloud
management platform. So the Cisco Networking Cloud is not only the cloud management platform, but it's also the on-premise
management platform. We have customers who
want our cloud first. We have customers who
are on-premise focused. We have many who are hybrid, which means they wanna run on-prem, but they wanna get the
attributes of having access to unlimited data and what's happening across the internet and
their SaaS applications. And so, you need to have
some set of telemetry or at least a tether back
to the cloud, so to speak, but really it's about unified experiences and driving those outcomes. And so, you've started to see us pull our various assets together. For example, back at Cisco Live EMEA, which have them back in February, we brought our application dynamics and our Meraki platforms, and we brought those together, so we made it easy to understand, and you're gonna see
how we're gonna continue to connect these different
platforms that we have and create those unified experiences, but the networking portion is what we're calling the cloud networking or the Cisco Networking
Cloud, which is our vision for how all these things come together. - So it's gonna make my
management job a lot easier rather than like going back a bit. The console into a
device, ssh into a device, I'm managing them through a
single device or cloud, right? - Yeah, you shouldn't
have to ssh to anything. Now there's different kinds of- - [David] Showing how old I am. - Yeah, you shouldn't have to shh to... Now of course, there are scenarios where we have people
who would like to get in and they would like to troubleshoot. So our Meraki cloud, as an example, which has got millions of devices out in the infrastructure today, running networks around the globe, one of the biggest requests
that we have from them is like, hey, can I just from the Meraki dashboard, just get a prompt and
do a few show commands, so I can troubleshoot fast
or at least understand in case I... I just feel better quite frankly. And so actually, one of the announcements that we've made is that
you actually can go and do that now, so you can get the best of the Meraki cloud dashboard, but if you would like to go
in there for whatever reason and do a show arp cache,
(David laughs) then you can knock yourself
out and go do that now, which I think was gonna
make people feel better, just more comfortable
about moving to the cloud. - And I mean, there was this
big driver a few years ago about automation perhaps
using Python or other tools, Ansible, to automate. They're just taking it
a step further, right? - Well, I think there's
always going to be people and users who have custom environments. I think the hyperscalers
are great examples of that where they're gonna have their
own custom automation stacks and tools that they use. And so you need to have
consistency coming northbound off of the devices. And so, we subscribe to all
of those different models, whether you're using YANG or NETCONF or whatever you're using northbound. And we have put a lot of
investment in that area, but the majority, the number of customers really want a simplified experience. And having a UI that if I
have a retail branch here and I set up another retail branch, it's gonna assume you want the same SSIDs. It's gonna assume that you want it to look like the other one, and it's just going to
configure it all for you. And if you need to change it, you can go through and
and change it that way. - I'm glad you used that word simplicity because this is something
I've heard you mention before about security's so complex. - It's really, you know, if you think about the
complexity with security. So there's two dimensions
of complexity on security. One is for the users. One of the most insecure
systems you can build is a really secure system
that's really hard to use because no one uses it and
people do an end round. - Password on a piece of paper. - Exactly. And so what we have to do is make sure that we make it really easy for the user, and making it really easy
for the user in security in the land of security is
building the most boring demos because you shouldn't have much to demo 'cause you connect to get to work, and security's happening in
the background, it's plumbing. On the IT side and the
administration side, the practitioners, it's
super complicated to go out and manage policies, do set rules. If you think about a
firewall set of policies and rules like we were
just talking about this in another session we were doing this, but here's a customer
who has 6,200,000 rules. - Six million.
- In the firewall. - Wow.
- At some point in time it, it doesn't make any sense. And so, what we have to do is make sure that the experience on
how you manage those gets to be radically simplified, which you can't do if you've got, you know, hundreds of
products in your environment. So what we try to do is we simplify that. And when you simplify it,
experience in my mind is a choice. Every pixel we as vendors
choose to put on a screen is an active choice. We should just do it carefully. You know, we shouldn't do it haphazardly or as a happenstance or it just happened. And when you do it right, I think it fundamentally
changes lives for the better. Now, here's a thing to think about, especially with generative AI. I think experiences will
look get completely altered. So we are in the fourth major revolution of user experience evolution. So the first one was command line. Then that got added on with
graphical user interfacing. All of these are additive. Then that got added on with
touch as a phase three. And now we are in the
prompt interface era. And the prompt interface actually fusing with graphical user interface
will allow us to go out and say with natural language, I can provide some kind of desire for the computer to do something. The computer then can come
back and converse with me and reason with me, give
me a set of options. And now I have an
augmented aid or assistant who's helping me through a task, which then allows me
to make my job simpler. Everyone has an assistant,
and we're able to go out and get a job done in a
much more effective way. But the design point that
we are working with is we don't want to automate away jobs. We want to augment them
with an assistant for AI. And so you will see a lot of announcements that we made at this
event where, you know, we have a policy assistant, so that you can actually
have policies being created through natural language. We have a SOC assistant, so
that if you have a breach, you could be notified by an AI bot saying, hey, there's a breach, what
do you want me to do about it? You actually converse with it. Maybe there's a certain set of responses and remediations that
need to be put in place, and once those are put in place, you're off to the races. You go ahead and deploy them. Those are meaningful step
function changes in innovation that can happen as a result of AI and incorporating that
into the entire platform. And so, there's two things. In order to have a great experience, you can't have a
fragmented infrastructure. You have to have a platform. And then you have to have telemetry that correlates with
each other, so you know, hey, there's something happening over here in the attack kill
chain on the email side. There's something happening on my device where a process got
kickstarted in PowerShell. I need to make sure that those
two things get correlated to know that this is actually a breach because what you'll start to
see happen is the difference between legitimate set of
activities and a breach will get harder and harder
to decipher in this world. And so we have to make sure that we actually get,
you know, more creative around how you use telemetry,
handle security events at machine scale rather than human scale, and really kind of solve problems in an elegant way from a
user experience perspective. - Are there two platforms? Is it networking and security, or is it one combined platform? - Highly interoperated platform. So there's a platform for networking that does things for networking that then works very closely
the platform for security. And if you happen to be in Meraki and you're going out and setting a policy and you wanna set a policy in umbrella, you can just write from there, click on a button and you can actually start
setting policies in (indistinct), so they'll be fully integrated. So the way we talk about this is they're loosely coupled,
tightly integrated. - Yeah, because I mean,
the concern I think for a lot of my audience who are watching is I have to learn TCP/IP. Now I have to learn Python. Now I have to learn AI. Now I have to learn this,
that, and the other. There's just so much
overwhelming stuff to learn. So it sounds like this
is trying to simplify it as much as possible full
of practitioners, right? - Yeah, simplification
is definitely there. And that I would say that's a big theme of the show across both
of our respective domains, and our domains are intricately connected. - Yeah, for sure.
- You know, when you think about the simplicity of trying
to find a specific problem, this is one of the reasons
why three years ago we acquired ThousandEyes, and from there, we have
put a lot of investment into ensuring that they're integrated into the networking portfolio to make it easy to deploy agents. We've announced on the main stage today that there's an ability to
go and integrate with AWS. So you can always see what's happening across the global internet.
with what's happening with BGP. You now can see deeply into AWS. And so if there's a specific problem, you can see it, you can mediate, you can pick a different
path going out at AWS, but you also can see agents
that are being deployed now in Webex devices and agents
that are being deployed inside of Meraki devices as well. So you have now another
million plus devices you can deploy agents on to really understand
what's happening intimately in your own business,
across the global internet, across SaaS applications, and now inside of the AWS infrastructure, and it will tell you exactly
where those problems are and let you know what
you need to solve it. And then also, we have
our WAN insights tool that is built upon similar
types of AI engines that enables you to predict these things and gives you suggestions on
how to change your topologies, so that you don't experience
those types of issues in the future. - You know, one of the
things I would say is, well, we wanna make sure
that we don't do at Cisco, like many companies sometimes
make the mistake of doing, is shipping the org chart. And so the way that we think about is we are gonna ship solutions to use cases by delivering an integrated platform. We're not gonna ship our org chart. So what does that mean in practicality? ThousandEyes is something that, you know, yes, you have to deliver
a great experience, but sometimes that experience
isn't gonna work out because something went wrong. Well, you should be able to
then detect what went wrong, specifically pinpoint
where that issue was, and then be able to resolve that issue. And so, when we think about
having a great experience for Secure Access that we just launched, that's integrated in ThousandEyes, but ThousandEyes is
actually part of our client. And you don't even have to think about it. If the experience is bad, you would know exactly where. Is it the Wi-Fi? Is it the application? You know, is it something else? Is it your ISP provider? And then be able to hone in over there and solve that problem. And I think that power of
that breadth of the portfolio is really valuable if
done in the right way when you actually fully
integrate these things together, which is what we've been working on for the past 18 to 24 months. And now they're starting to actually... You're starting to see the
results of that come out. - Yeah, I mean, the problem
with security, like you said, what 18,000, not the 3,000- - 15.
- 15,000, sorry. - It'll be 18 by next week. (all laugh) - I mean, how do you learn all that? I mean, you need a company
that can do everything, and I think that's the
power of Cisco, right? Because you're doing networking, security, all these other things. So you're simplifying it by combining all of these pieces together. - Simplifying, and you're
trying to make sure that the telemetry is correlated. So, if you think about
a typical attack chain, how does it start? It starts on email. You got an email from a
Nigerian prince that says, "Click on this link, "and I'll be able to
give you $10 million." You click on the link.
- Except it's AI now, so it's even worse, right?
- Right. And so what happens is
you start from email. It goes to a website that
didn't exist two hours ago. From there, it downloads
some kind of malware onto your device and spawned some process or PowerShell within your device, and then it moves laterally. Most of the defenses
for each one of those, those control points, email,
web, endpoint, and network have been individual point solutions. What we are now able to do is
say we've got native telemetry across all of those, and we
take telemetry from third party and ingest it into our system, and then correlate that telemetry, so that we are able to not only
go out and detect a breach, but detect detect it at
a much higher resolution than someone else can, and
then not just detect it, but respond and remediate
that as quickly as possible. - A lot of the people who watch my channel are younger than, say, us. You guys are 21, but I mean I'm a bit- - Enjoy it. (all laugh)
Youth goes away really fast. - But they always ask two big things, and AI will be one of them. It's like AI's gonna kill our jobs. Is it even worth getting into this? And then the other one is like they wanted me to ask you the vision. I'm starting out or I'm trying to get into Cisco networking or security. Where's it going? Where's the world going? So perhaps you can both tackle that. - Well, I will start off
with it's a great time to get into networking and security. I think they go hand in
hand with each other. I'll give you a few stats to
show you that in my opinion. I started at Cisco in '95 in tech, and went from there, and
like we dreamed of the day when IP would be the predominant
mode of communication. Well, we're definitely there, but I still think we're at
the beginning of connectivity, and the reason why I say that,
I'll give you two examples. We have a communications
management platform that we call Control Center. It has over 200 million
mobile connected things connected to it that go
across the radio network. It could be AT&T or any of
our 60 plus carrier partners around the world. So a good chunk of the
world's connected car connect into our platform. We're kind of a behind the scenes. It's not extremely well known. Less than 10% of all cars are connected, and by 2030, 100% of
all cars are connected. Depending upon how you count, it can be anywhere from 60 to
75 million cars sold a year. 2023, 7 years from now,
just for cars, right, we're looking at north of a billion things that are gonna need to be connected. And that's just cars. That doesn't include smart
intersections, smart meters, those little scooters you have to pay for to zoom around cities that you feel, you know,
slightly dangerous. There's so much more that
needs to be connected, healthcare, and every
single industry needs to be digitalized, and it's
just gonna get more complicated. And so the opportunity
for people who are coming and learning about these things is that you can help play a critical role in driving the next
phase of, quite frankly, the global growth of the
planet, which is exciting. - Look, I think it's a
gift to be early in career at this stage of humanity because there's so much
that actually makes it easy for us to learn quickly. But historically, I'd say
couple pieces of advice I'd give to the folks that are younger in the early in career
generation is historically, when I was growing up,
knowledge was coveted. It was like you needed to
know in order to be special. I don't think knowledge
is gonna be as coveted. I think what's gonna be
more coveted is the ability to ask the right questions,
so that you can have access to that knowledge at your fingertips. But the dexterity with
which you ask questions will really matter, and that will require that the new generation coming in will have to be more
curious and more thoughtful about the kind of questions they ask of not just each other,
but also of machines because those things will
start diffuse over time. And I think it'll be a
very, very interesting time. And by the way, the quick
question on, will my job go away? You can bank on it that if you're 21, there will be decades
you'll work on something that in the subsequent
decades, no one might do, and that's something that
you just have to get used to and just learn the new thing that's there. But I do believe in
the ingenuity of humans where I don't think there'll be a time when all jobs will go away for everyone. I think you'll have new jobs, and there'll be a lot of displacement. That displacement will cause some pain. And I think the more you
are skilled at going out and learning new talents
and new abilities, you'll be able to just stay relevant. But the quest for relevance will be harder for the next generation than was for us because the half-life of
jobs, of so many things is actually shortening quite a bit. - So if I was starting now, or you were starting again,
what would you study? Any tips of that? 'Cause I get this all the
time from the audience. What should I learn? What should I study? Any advice?
- AI is not a bad place to start. I think security is actually... Anything that is critical
infrastructure for the world that doesn't go out of
vogue and outta style are good areas to be in. You know, between the two of us, we've got networking, security, and connectivity and collaboration. Those are three you can't go wrong in. Like it's like people are gonna want to communicate with each
other 100 years from today. People are gonna wanna
make sure that they're safe and secure 100 years from today. People are gonna want to connect to different people in
different parts of the world 100 years from today. That's not gonna change. So pick the things where the core foundational
assumptions don't change rather than things that keep changing. - Yeah, I'm sure you've
got a global audience, and so this may not resonate, but if you look at why
California grew so fast, you had this thing called the Gold Rush, and they found gold, and then, you know, a lot of people moved in a very short period of time, but the people who actually made money were the ones who provided
the infrastructure, the people who provided the
tools, Levi's jeans, right? Those are the people who
had sustained ability to be in business. And when you think of there's always gonna be new applications, there's always gonna be new workloads, there's always gonna be new
ways of reaching the consumer and delivering new services, but you're always gonna
need infrastructure, always. - Yeah, and it sounds like
with cars and everything, it's just gonna be more so, and I mean, how many people
are not connected in the world? - Three billion out of eight billion. So a billion are totally unconnected. Two billion or underserved, which means they don't
have enough connectivity to actually participate
in the digital economy. So you're talking about 3/8 of the planet is currently in that state. And if you don't think that
connectivity is a human right and you're just, you know,
a money-grubbing capitalist, it's good for business too. So if you were to connect
to all of those people, you would add 37 trillion
to the global GDP. - That's amazing. How is AI or ML changing
the way that we do things? You've mentioned some of that already, but have you got any more like
visionary stuff or like tips? - Yeah, I mean look, we've
been investing massively in AI for the past several years, and you know, the big
hype around AI right now is around generative AI. I think it was a seminal moment for AI. I think on November 30th, you know, the world changed with AI because of... And for good reason because
if you think about humans, one of the key things to
keep in mind is language is a big reason why we are as successful a species as we are. And when machines can understand and process language and reason with it, there's profound implications to that that are very consequential, but if you think about
what we've done with AI prior to that, and then I'll talk about, you know, generative AI for a second, is audio intelligence, really important because sound and acoustics management actually changes the quality
of how people interact. Video intelligence, really important, and the way that you go out and do this in a collaboration, so
that you can have... If there's seven people in a room, can I create seven individual
video streams for them, so that I can now see
everyone in a close up view? That actually makes a big difference in me feeling connected with them if I'm not in the same
place as everyone else. Any kind of analytics is
gonna be really important. And then when you start
thinking about generative AI, any use cases around summarization like we just announced,
meeting summarization, what did I miss? Catch me up. Boy, that's amazing. If I miss a meeting and
I can just make sure that it can catch me up
rather than me having to listen to a 45 minute
recording, that's fantastic. Can I set a policy in my firewall by just asking it to do something and going back and forth a few times? That's a, you know, step
function improvement from where we used to be. Can I make sure that if there's
an attack that's occurring that someone is notifying me, and that that bot can
actually engage with me in a dialogue, so that I actually have... The biggest thing that
people have underestimated about AI is not the fact that it can actually aggregate
human corpus of knowledge. It's that it's gonna come
up with brand new insights that did not exist in the
human corpus of knowledge and be able to do something about it. So, curing cancer might
have been something that is now possible because
there might be new insights that come out on how to cure cancer that humans hadn't thought about. That's mind bending.
- It is. - You know, and the fact
that we can all participate and work in this era is such a privilege and such a good fortune. And I think everyone who is
early in career, you should... I wish I had another 30 years where, actually, you
know, I could take back 30 and be 24 years old. I'm just gonna have to live
longer, so we can keep going. This is fun. Isn't it fun? - You got another 30 years,
don't worry about it. - I got another 30 years.
- You got it for sure. - But I'm old though. - You're like an Energizer Bunny. Like you're gonna be fine. You'll be just fine. Look, there's a few places
on the networking side. First of all, we provide
a lot of infrastructure for those extremely large language models that some of these
hyperscalers are building out. We have offered on how to go
and enable smaller enterprises to go and build out their
own AI infrastructure. That was one of the things
that we announced this week. We see that there's
internal benefits at Cisco, so simple things like how do
we enable our documentation, people to be more
effective, to be more clear, be able to go and do that. And then we talked about... Jeetu talked about how do
we improve our products and our product experience. Last year, in fact, we
announced the ability to have network insights. So, we're gonna give you look at how you can predict
what's going to happen in the network and then make changes before those things actually happen. That in itself is powerful. And then for our own software developers, it's a force multiplier. So some of the teams I've
talked to outside the company, they see that 70% of
their code being generated is being generated
through this augmentation. We're not quite there yet, but, you know, it's about velocity, and if we can increase velocity, we can create even more
simple experiences even faster for our customers and our
users, and that's real exciting. - I think on the first
draft for everything in life might actually be something. We might never have to start
from a blank sheet of paper if you know the right question to ask, and that's pretty cool. - I was gonna ask you, I mean, it sounds like an abstraction now. Rather than like being right
on like working in binary, we abstracted from all those details and we're letting the machines do all the mundane stuff, right? - That used to be the case that you said machines
do the mundane stuff, and humans do the stuff
that require judgment. I think that's gonna change where machines will also provide judgment, and humans will also provide judgment. And I actually believe that if you take the
optimistic point of view, the combination of both those judgments will create a much more potent judgment than what any of them could
have come up with by themselves. And in the pessimistic point of view, public-private partnership's
gonna be really important for policy setting because this could have a pretty catastrophic downstream effect, so responsible AI, having
an attention to bias, making sure that transparency and fairness are thought about, having the right kind of policy in place. Those are gonna be non-trivial things that I don't think we as a
society have figured out yet that we need to. - So we are outta time unfortunately, but last thing, there's still a future for young people in tech, right? - Yes.
- 100% - Amazing, that's the
only place you should be. - I like that. Thanks, both, really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing. (relaxed electronic music)
