SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Welcome to Uplink, where we explore the world of digital infrastructure, uncovering the technology fueling AI and cloud innovation with the leaders making it happen. Well, welcome to another uh session of Uplink. I've got Brink Sanders with us today. He's an absolute legend. He and I had a chance to work together for a number of years at Cisco. Seventeen, nearly 18 years at Cisco, had a whole heap of wicked roles, actual global roles. You've been you were in Asia Pack where we first met some time ago. You were actually the uh the strategy in the strategy office for the CEO of Cisco for a period of time, and we also crossed over there. So you would have some incredible insights into what happens uh behind the scenes, and some of which I'm sure you uh can share, and probably a lot that you can't, but really in interesting insight there. But then you've also pivoted then into running all of enterprise networking globally from a sales perspective. I know you've got we also uh rolled up to similar leaders for a period of time. You crossed over, I crossed out. You also run Thousand Eyes, so Thousand Eyes rolls up to you, which is the business I had an awesome chance to run, and that's what that little thing is behind you on the on the whichever that you're right. Um you also run the Meraki business and that transition that's been going on inside Cisco. I know there's a lot going on there. You know, all the enterprise networking, which is probably the vast majority of the billions and billions of dollars that comes in for Cisco. Congrats on the new promotion, SVP leading it up, and also Dave, who you would have worked with in Asia Packs now coming back to the US to run all of the specialists. So a lot going on. Why don't we just start there? Um maybe just give a little intro on what what your role actually is uh and and what you've been up to, and then yeah, but any a bit of the history and then I'd love to hear some of the the the changes that's going on at Cisco on the market and what's what's what's hot. Sound sounds like a plan.

SPEAKER_01: 2:01

Uh you'll have to guide me along the way. That was a lot there. I could probably spend the next two hours, you know, unpacking the gentleman. Yeah. So first of all, great to see you. It's great to be here. So thanks for having me. Um yeah, so so about me. I, you know, yeah, it's been almost 18 years uh at Cisco. I never thought I'd be anywhere for 18 years, but it's been a it's been an incredible ride. Um, and I've been very fortunate to see the company from a lot of different uh angles. Um I'll start with you, many roles. So many roles. Absolutely, right? So today uh you nailed it. I'm the SVP for our global networking sales team. So here at Cisco, we've got an enormous amount of frontline sellers that sell the whole portfolio, and there's a handful of us that really look after the individual technology areas. So I've got our kind of traditional catalyst portfolio, which is switching routing wireless, Rocky portfolio along the same lines, thousand eyes, and I also have our industrial IoT portfolio. Of course. When you add that all up, it really is it's about half of our product business. And you you hit it earlier, we've been on this journey of integration, right? There's been so much transformation. Let's come back to that a little bit later, give you a little bit of my history. But I think that's a that's just a great topic to dig into a little bit because both the technology and the way that Cisco is going to market has really been evolving really over the last few years on the on the networking side. So been here, like I said, almost 18 years. I did uh so I started out, uh, my early career was consulting. And I know that's sometimes a bad word for folks, but I'll tell you what what was great for me is just kind of a young kid coming out of school, and it was an opportunity just to see companies in a lot of different ways. And um, I I got started in the service provider world doing strategy work, which was part strategy, part kind of operations. And when you when you do operations, kind of new process and strategy for service providers, you pretty quickly get to software, and then you pretty quickly get to the networking elements that they use to deliver services for their customers. It's either defining services, uh, or it's you know how they manage their networks, how they deploy those services, how they repair them when stuff doesn't go right. Uh so you got a really like big lens into networking. Um, left for a little while. Which is our world. That's the biggest thing. This is the foundation for me, like a really good basis in just the the early days there. You know, in the US, it was the time of deregulation. So there was all sorts of investment coming in. Um it was fantastic. So uh that was kind of a over a few roles, that was kind of my entry into Cisco. I was doing a lot of consulting work more on the how companies operate and was doing some work with Cisco and um early on, you know, sold a project in, and one thing led to another like, hey, would you be interested in coming and doing this inside Cisco? And the reason I share the background is it kind of led me to being very internally focused for the first kind of seven years. I really focused my time on um kind of what we're doing to run Cisco, to pursue the opportunities that we had in the market, uh, to deliver for our shareholders. And it was a very internal view of things. Um, and it took me a little while, it took me moving to Asia, getting to know you and and others. Kind of the the first day there, I was like, hey, I really want to get back out to the broad market. Like we're a big company, a lot of things keep me interested, but like let me get out and and see the world again. And that's how I transitioned to the sales leader.

SPEAKER_00: 5:31

Which which um was it under Irving, I think.

SPEAKER_01: 5:33

Yes. So it was under Irving Tan. So I went out to help lead operations for him. Dave West was running the uh SCs, and he was also the enterprise networking architecture leader in the region. Annoying. So after, you know, a year and a half or so, two years, uh, I convinced Dave. He got promoted, he became the overall architecture leader. So he had enterprise networking, collab was in the region at the time. He had data center, service provider, right? All these pieces. And uh I managed to convince him that I would be a viable candidate to replace him, to be his enterprise networking leader working for Dave. So that's kind of how I got to know him. And he I I have a lot to thank him for for kind of getting me into this world at Cisco. And I've tried very hard to stay here uh for a long time. It's been great.

SPEAKER_00: 6:22

No, it's well, Dave's done so well, and he's also it's funny because it's like Irving was a pivotal moment there. Dave, Irving's gone on to do some incredible stuff. He's I think you know, CEO of the Western Digital. I think it they've split that. I know there's multiple paths there. I can't remember how that's all landed, but that's exciting. Dave's then just I mean, he spent his time in Japan. He then went, I think he went to the back to the US, then back to Japan, then across the uh SVP of Asia Pack. Now he's come back and he's in and and I guess you were you're reporting to Dave now. I guess he runs all the specialists.

SPEAKER_01: 6:56

Yeah, it's it's interesting. So it's come full circle for Dave. He's now the overall specialist leader. But when I was back at the as the EN leader in APJC, Gordon Thompson was the EN leader in AMIA. He now runs all of AMIA. So it's interesting now with um a lot of the the folks who've who've done a stint in networking being in in leadership roles here uh with the colours.

SPEAKER_00: 7:21

I mean, networking's kind of a big deal at Cisco. So I think uh it it it certainly makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so I was obviously in the specialist group when Patrick was there. So Patrick's now moved into the um head of uh Americas, and you've got a new CRO, uh which is exciting as well. Yeah. So Oliver's, I mean, he ran channel for a long time, Germany. So there's lots and lots of change. I think there's lots of good great change. Got a new uh with a chief product officer, um G2, has I mean, he's killing it at the moment from what I can see. He's actually seems to be making some really big impacts publicly for Cisco, and I think that's that's been needed for a long time. Um so uh you know, stock price probably like close to all time highs, lots and lots of benefits going on. It's like everything's sort of um powering. The AI explosion is is definitely, I assume, helping Cisco as well. You guys are so well positioned, everything needs to connect, all the networks have become key yet again, sort of these sort of um, you know, these cycles in time. And you know, hardware is all of a sudden very, very cool again, uh, with NVIDIA sort of you know, one of the largest companies on the planet, literally a hardware and software company. Well, well, Cisco is a hardware and software company, and and it's not easy to do that. So how how are you seeing Cisco in the market? What's changing in terms of the networking space? AI is obviously a big part of what you're doing, and we chatted last time. So I don't know, just high levels on some of those viewpoints. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 8:56

Maybe I'll start with G2. Um, maybe take a little bit of an internal view and then play it back out to the market a bit. Um, look, you know, we have a very wide portfolio inside Cisco. And I think every one of our customers probably at one point in time or another has been frustrated that we have, you know, different things that do the same thing, but optimized for different outcomes. And in many ways, like that was an asset for many, many years because we work with some of the we work with some of the world's largest organizations that have very complex environments and we pride ourselves on meeting those requirements. But it's a double-edged sword. So when you want to move quickly and you've met all those requirements, those two things don't always operate in concert. And I think one of the things that's been really exciting for me over the past, you know, really two years, but really starting to accelerate when G2 came into his role about a year ago, is he's really brought that meant that mentality of how do we get out there and really think about the experience that we're delivering for our customers around the entire portfolio? How do we start to challenge some of those complexities that while they they were probably the right answer at the time, because they met some of those unique requirements for customers? I think our customers are struggling with some of that complexity and now we're trying to simplify themselves. So he's really brought a singular focus on how do we simplify the portfolio, make it as customer-centric as we possibly can, and really help to deliver those outcomes. He's also like massively improved the pace of innovation. Like he has brought a new sense of urgency to our engineering teams. It's been fantastic for me. I'm sitting on the sidelines of that cheering because we've been asking to move faster for so long, and you know, we're really seeing it. So um, so that's been really that that's been fantastic.

SPEAKER_00: 10:46

And a lot of what's a big pivot is to how Meraki is a big part of that. You know, you had this what was simple and easy and so sort of cloud-driven. You had this very complicated, and over time they've been coming together. But it's in the last, and we've talked about that for years when we were at Cisco, and in the last year or two, it seems that it's all come together, not only just engineering, well, it's engineering and all the go-to-market. And so actually it's it's real. So there's there's two parts, right?

SPEAKER_01: 11:12

So the products started to come together a little bit with Wi-Fi 6 a couple years ago, Wi-Fi 6E, but really when we introduced Wi-Fi 7, the first like Cisco AP uh unified license, so it can come up whether it's on a cloud platform, which is the Meraki dashboard or on-prem catalyst center. And that's now starting to roll through switching, which we announced Cisco Live, routing, and the whole portfolio is really starting to converge. Um, and you nailed it, it's it's the products, but it's also the teams, right? It's it's converging in engineering. We did this on the sales team about a year ago. We're kind of just finished our first full year of a frontline networking team that you know really wants to just meet our customers, whether they want to operate in the cloud or whether they want to be on-prem. And honestly, right now, what we're seeing is the vast majority of our customers are kind of in both camps. Most of them want to really use the capabilities that cloud offers, but a lot of them are in an on-prem world or have compliance requirements or other things they're trying to solve for that makes that migration hard. So we're really leaning in to help with that. I will say there are areas that our competitors have done a good job of getting a little bit ahead of us. And I openly welcome that. It keeps us on our toes. It helps us to respond. You know, we've got to deal with the breadth of the portfolio and the customers that we've got, make sure that they stay, their investments stay protected as we drive this migration. But for us, we're super excited about the portfolio we have. Um, and I will tell you, you know, you asked earlier about AI and kind of how it's influencing. So G2 is kind of bringing everything together to really help simplify things, to drive the right outcomes, to deliver innovation faster. Um, AI is to me the thing that we're uh both trying to capture to make sure that we're there for our customers, that we're there uh delivering technology that our customers want that can carry them through uh those AI transitions and really help them deliver on AI outcomes and also be there with the right innovation and technology such that we continue to grow as a company and serve our shareholders, right? So it's been a hundred percent, it's been a good balance. Um you you're seeing a huge part of it. And I would, I would say the first wave of that was really heavily, and I would say we're probably still heavily in the data center, right? This is about it's about compute, it's about data center networking. You brought up NVIDIA, right? It's about how do you bring together all these elements to really um have the most efficient model capabilities that you can have, the foundation to train and ultimately provide inferencing for models. What we see in networking, kind of my world, which is more the campus branch, we're just starting to see our customers kind of wake up to the reality that, you know what, once those models start to get trained and are capable, one of the the we see a big shift in the in the in the utilization of agentic um capabilities. And those agentic capabilities are not gonna stay back in a data center somewhere. There's gonna be more and more more and more use cases that'll start to move that out to the edge. And we really see a world where whether it's you know robots or some physical manifestation on the other end that uh of connectivity that we're trying to support, or whether it's um, you know, agenc operators that are operating to support us as employees, we see it really changing the fabric of our campus and branch networks. Um and that's something I think our customers are just now starting to starting to wake up to. And that's gonna it's gonna fundamentally change what we've got to do kind of out on the edge of those networks.

SPEAKER_00: 14:43

What we're seeing this as well. I mean, we we've been we live inside data centers, so we've been on this crazy, like explosive journey where data centers are the hottest thing in the world, everyone's throwing billions and billions of dollars at it, they're trying to get space, they're trying to get power, you know, they're racing to build the the craziest giggly. Trying to cool it. It's completely wild out there. And then we uh we are this data center. We live inside data centers, and then we're connecting all these uh pieces together. And it's funny because I think that the boom for Cisco is is not even begun. And that is, yes, there's this data center element where people are quickly building physical data centers, then they're gonna buy all the kit to go in the data centers. And of course, all the networking in the DC networking's no doubt exploding for you guys. And I I caught up with Kevin Wallumweber a while ago, and he was just like, this thing's just like crazy. It's huge. It's huge. But that's the first part. The second part is then actually all the enterprises picking it up and they haven't yet picked it up. As in, they are slowly, but it's not it's not at mass scale yet. And that's where we'll see, I think for you, massive explosion in how AI is used at the edge. And what it does is it's sort of funny. I was I was telling this to some of our shareholders. They're like, hey, how is the AI uh explosion benefiting Megaport? And I said, like, there's three things. I said that there's us actually connecting AI exchanges, so that's actually enabling the GPU as a service provider to live onto our platform and so we can instantly get to them. Uh I said there's actually AI companies that are buying from Megaport. Like some of our top 10 customers are now AI companies that are building clouds globally that are using us. But I said, if I had to say the biggest impact, which is kind of like probably not intuitive enough for you to think about, is the whole process has been a board says to the CEO, Hey, well, what's our AI strategy? What are we doing? Because we could get disrupted. And the CEO goes, Oh, uh, talks to the CF to the CIO, you know, your chief information officer, and said, Hey, what's our AI strategy? Because we don't want to get disrupted by our competitors. And the CIO says, Dude, we haven't done anything for the last four years because you've told us to stop spending and reduce our cost and hold this. And remember the COVID thing? Like we have literally just been trying to cut our costs. We're not doing anything. And then the CEO says, Well, who's stopping you from doing that? It's like the CFO. And so the CEO says to the CFO, go give that person some money to do something. And then the CIO does the first thing and they go, Well, if we're going to get ourselves sorted, we're going to have to get all the, we're going to get Wi-Fi 7, we're going to have to get our networking up to date, we'll have to get our security up to date. And then we can start layering on these AI pieces. So it's like the one thing that IT has never missed is a great hype cycle to go and solve all the stuff that they needed to solve anyway. And on top of that, they will. So the point is they'll they'll re- they'll do that big build, which is going to be huge, I think, for you. Then on top of that, they're going to go actually get a whole bunch of AI stuff working at some point. And this agentic piece, all these different models that are custom built or specific to whatever the use case is, that's the next flow. So that'll be awesome. So that's boom time for you guys.

SPEAKER_01: 17:51

Well, so let's break that down a little bit because that because I think there's a few things. First of all, um the first wave that I think we've seen, and I think in many ways what's fueling some of our growth now is the tail end of that COVID cycle, right? We saw hybrid, the hybrid work kind of hit. It's been a big return to office that we've seen kind of across the globe. It's never 100%. You know, that pendulum is still swinging. But for the most part, I think customer, our customers did wake up to the reality that their networks fundamentally needed to be modernized for a whole host of reasons, right? What I think is going to happen next is you started to go there, right? And this is just one example, but you think the AI assistant today, we all use Chat GPT or you know, Perplexity or one of these other models out there. That that interaction you have as a user doesn't really fundamentally change the bandwidth requirements. But is that as those AI assistants become more AI operators, they become more independent and supporting employees doing different tasks, we very much have an expectation that that capability starts to move closer and closer to the user because you're going to have interaction with a user that it's operating somewhat autonomously. And it's not just going to be one, it's going to be many. And so as you start to think about that in their role, you can see a world where the traffic patterns within the campus or in a small branch, like on site and across, really start to fundamentally grow and increase. And then you think of, you know, I use the example of robots earlier, right? You really start to think of some of those external form factors, which are higher bandwidth requirements that can use AI models. So as we see that shift out to the edge, we definitely see a second wave coming. And it's not just the connectivity and bandwidth requirements that are needed, right? Not, you know, at the edge to serve to serve users, but also back to, you know, at least the overall models, right? I think we're going to see a little bit of a distributed model environment. Um, but it's the security because securing a network to up when you have multiple agents that are working there is a different thing than just trying to secure the user that sits on the other end. Because those agents are prone to, you know, that that that they represent cybersecurity risk just like a human does. And you want, you need to make sure that they're doing the things that they're supposed to be doing inside of a digital environment, just like you do with a human. And that interaction is going to bring new security requirements. So we really do see a lot of the activity now being about how do you create an environment that is has the right level of connectivity and network infrastructure, but is also secure enough to really serve the world that we're going to be living in five, seven years from now, because that's like the like that is within reach to the decisions our customers are making about network infrastructure today. Like you can't forget about that as you make that decision.

SPEAKER_00: 20:49

Agreed. And that's, I think that's where I've always seen Cisco benefit when the the big changes, big moves, moving to cloud, whatever. Everyone needs to get everything updated and ready, and then you can take the next step. The piece of if you look at all the other history of things that have come in and disrupted, it always happens like across a public internet. Like ChatGPT, we access that just through the public environment. The data that it's can like trained on is all public information and it sits inside a public registry. It's like everything's public about that. The next step is everything has to, if you want to bring that into the enterprise, everything needs to remain private. You can't hack it or steal the data. To your point, what was funny is like the next problem is that these AI bots hallucinate. You know, they do weird things that we don't fully understand. And it's like humans do weird things that we don't fully understand half the time as well. And so um what needs to happen is all is private, it needs to be protected, it needs to be secure, it needs to access only the data that it needs to have access to, it needs to spit out the data that it only is allowed to share that data with that particular person. Like that is the next piece of it. And it's and the reason we haven't seen it uh in your workplace hugely, like we're not seeing humans replaced yet, or certainly we're not seeing m major human replacements. And I don't actually think we will fully see that. I think what will happen is the treadmill just gets faster, everyone just runs faster. But at some point there will be these things doing these jobs that help the whole company move forward very quickly, but protecting all of that information is is gonna be paramount, and that's the tricky part. And that's why I don't think we've seen it. That's why I say that it's it's still coming. You know, this massive transition is still coming. It was like the early days of cloud. Early days everyone's like, we're all gonna get into cloud. And then, you know, now look at it, it's oh, so big. But back then it was it was such early days, and everyone thought it was sort of a problem.

SPEAKER_01: 22:44

And everybody thought we were gonna wind up 100% cloud with everything. That pendulum kind of swung a little bit back and forth. I'd say we're probably more you know purely hybrid in the middle now. As AI comes up, it's leaning back towards cloud because to build some of these, you know, large models to really get the training that you need, it's really hard to do that within a private data center unless you have really large resources. So it is interesting how that that shift is happening. I really think, you know, to the point about the the humans, I think the world that we're going to be living in is one where we as workers do more and more leaning on AI to support us and we become more productive and more thoughtful. And it's really the more um kind of, I don't want to say administrative, but it's some of the tasks that are not quite as value-added. And that that definition will change. But I I see it, I see it as an enabling function. Um, and I think it's on us to help develop, you know, young talent in a way that that doesn't fully replace what we have that talent doing, right? That we we find different ways to scale. Um, but I do think it's gonna change the face of work in the enterprise. And I think we're gonna see it over a period of of time. Um, and we see customers today grappling with where do you really get value out of it? Like I think that's still the thing is, you know, it's still in the hype cycle where the true hard use cases of delivering value are not as widespread as we need them to be to see that cycle really, to see the cycle really prove itself out.

SPEAKER_00: 24:14

Yeah, and I th and that's I think uh I can't remember Jensen just talked about it, I think it was just the other day, this whole inference being the next big play. And that it's sort of back to your point. You were saying everything's sort of it'll start centralizing this cloud, and then it starts to move to the edge as all those robots, whatever the fast decisions need to be made. But he had some insane prediction. Like uh he was basically saying that whatever they've done today, which is so big, inference, you know, is a thousand times more in terms of infrastructure, in terms of roller to build out, which is kind of staggering. Even if you even if your orders of a hundred magnitude off, it's still staggering.

SPEAKER_01: 24:55

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, it's interesting. Um, you know, I I talked about Cisco's breadth. I might have used the word complexity, but let's call it breadth now, right? You know, we built a lot over the years to really meet what our customers need. And, you know, it it we're also in the process of how do we apply AI to that landscape so that we can simplify the customer experience, deliver the value to our customer while still having that depth and breadth of capability behind the scenes so that our customers really get the best of both worlds, right? We I I I definitely would say that kind of you know, free where we are today in AI, we were under a lot of pressure to to really simplify. We said too much stuff for some of our customers, and they were just finding it hard to navigate, even if you know you take through the list of each one of those things and there was value in it, they're like, you know, this is a complicated space, and Cisco, you need to make it easier piece. Like we know we need to do that. Um, but it is great because AI is starting to offer us avenues to do that quickly, and we and with a level of uh not having to make the same trade-off of moving away from capability to be able to do that, right? So we we just introduced something called AI Canvas. Um, you know, the early use cases are, yeah, early use cases are in any customer environment, their their operations teams are working across, in most cases, multiple domains to troubleshoot a problem, right? A user's having a hard time buying something on the shopping cart. Is it the connectivity? Is it the application? Is it the security protocol? Like there's so many different things that could be wrong. And those so many different things are often managed by so many different teams. So rather than replacing the individual controllers and domains that have depth in those areas like security, like you know, network operations, can you abstract that and bring the elements of the problem together dynamically that's supported by AI so that you can work with it to troubleshoot and then hand off your work so that somebody else can pick up where you left off or can provide their domain expertise in a in a in a common canvas to be able to solve the problem. Like it's it's really kind of powerful cross-domain capability. Totally. It was just think about how hard that would have been even a year ago, right? So we are seeing some of these things that I think are gonna help us take, you know, a level of depth and technology and and and really make it easier for customers to achieve value through it. We're excited about that.

SPEAKER_00: 27:43

It I mean, well, right, I know we're running up up against the time, but the the piece I'll say on our side is Megaport's this really interesting company where it spent its life automating network infrastructure from day one. So everything is totally automated. And what I find really funny is when we hire a network engineer at Megaport, the first thing they do is they try to log on to a switch, a Cisco switch, and actually try and change CLI. Now, the interesting thing is they come in and that the first thing they get told is you actually cannot log into a switch. There's not a single device you can log into. What you need to do is log into the code that manages the entire network, three and a half thousand Cisco devices in 26 countries and a thousand data centers, you need to log into the the software that drives that. Because if you log into any single device, you break the automation globally. And so what's really interesting is we've been on this journey for a long time, not to log into every single device. Because remember, it's like, as you pointed out. It's like this one dude who knows how to log into every device. He like literally controls the keys to the entire networking, the entire communications for the company. And we've we've had to push them over time. And changing people's mindset to get out of just logging to the device is super, super difficult. But where you're headed with all the AI space is you'll in theory get to a point where you don't have this one single, you know, Messiah, God, whatever, running the entire network that knows how to log into everything. What you'll have is you'll be able to explain what you need to do to something ideally and pass that through. So it's not like a you know, sort of secret source that no one really understands how they can manage or run. And then inside that source is where the complexity lives, and it's the reason you can't extract because they they've got a special way of doing something that the a a newer platform doesn't do, and you end up just stuck. So it I feel like it's we've seen it as a company because we built that way. I think what's going to happen is all companies will benefit from this once it gets more, I think, mature.

SPEAKER_01: 29:40

I think that's right. Abstraction that you just talked about is was one of the most significant changes in networking. Like you know, really being able to take all this complexity and get get it to a place where you could um automate in a in a simple way without knowing every little type of device that sits below. And the different configuration commands to make it do what you want it to do. Oh, and then the like, how do you make sure you didn't break something with each subsequent command that you add? Like that. Like that was a complex world. So that abstraction was huge. I think what AI now brings on top of is the ability to bring in knowledge, right? We also talked at our Cisco Live last year about in June this year, excuse me, about um a deep network, uh, an AI model that we built that was trained very specifically on the depth that Cisco knows of networking, right? Not just the CCIE books that are out there, you know, a number of which we wrote, but also different data sources inside the inside the company. And we presented some statistics on its performance on the CCIE exam over CCIEs, right? So you're you're starting to build this knowledge in that can apply some of that abstraction, right?

SPEAKER_00: 30:50

Well, the the CCIE, AI, agentic CCIE.

SPEAKER_01: 30:55

But if you think about it, like this is a great application of AIs. AI and its evolution ought to really be able to help us get on top of some of the niggling problems that we've had in networks that even automation hasn't been able to solve. Like I and I I think the that that's kind of where I see this evolving. Like we're all we've been on a journey for a long time of that like self-healing network. And I think AI really gives us the tools to be able to do that. You mentioned hallucination earlier. It's it's not going to be overnight, but but this is what all of us are pursuing right now. And I think you're right, it's got some it's got some great benefits. I will say, you know, you mentioned the journey you all have been on. Um you all have been a great partner for us. I mean, if I think about what we do on the SD-WAN side in particular, the ability to partner with Megapore to be able to really offer customers this um this ability to go faster to deliver the outcomes they're they're trying to deliver, particularly across these, you know, multi-cloud environments where all of our customers differently, very few of our customers are only uh resident in one cloud, right? It it just we we know today they're they're there, it's almost impossible. And it's it's not a good redundancy architecture to only be in one cloud because you know, yes, there's redundancy built and and and and um there's redundancy built into that, but it it's examples where entire companies have disappeared. That's right. That that's right. No, 100%. So um to me, I I'm I I I do think we've got a lot more that we can do together on that front. And it's just what we can deliver for customers, I think is fantastic. And that automation, the abstraction, that ability to do things in software, I think is is at the heart of it. And that's something that we're really proud of. Um and I know it's been fantastic working with you on that.

SPEAKER_00: 32:45

Well, we love the SD-WAN team inside your business as well. We also procure a lot of switching infrastructure. That's the entire core is built on that. I think, as I said, with three and a half thousand switches. We're building out more data centers than than ever before. So basically that means a whole range of more Cisco infrastructure that gets rolled out. So we're excited about that. We love the partnership. Um I think that the future is really exciting, particularly from the AI space and all these pieces. But even just servicing the customers to deliver connectivity is still such a critical play. The hybrid cloud environment is actually getting more complicated. I mean, if you look at Oracle's announcements most recently, now there's another big cloud player like that's absolutely dominating, and you've got core weaves appearing, and we've got it's it's just getting more fragmented from a cloud perspective. So this sort of we call ourselves the Switzerland connector between it all. So yeah, thank you for everything that you've done for us. We're obviously not only a big customer, but also um a partner. Looking, I think I'm coming to see you guys at uh San Diego for the Summit coming up here. Summit coming up. So yeah, I'll come in. I don't know if you're getting there, but if you're there, I'll come see you there. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01: 33:55

I I will say it it's it's uh these days it feels like things are moving very fast, right? The technology is moving fast. AI enables us to move faster, but it also has its its challenges. Um, we're all learning how to get to the right, you know, value propositions. I I know I talked to our engineering teams, you know, more and more of what they do is AI assisted, um, which is just incredible. And I'm really hoping it helps to drive some of that innovation faster. But I feel like I'm in every event these days, not just to talk about the great stuff we're doing or hear about the great stuff our customers are doing or partners, but just to keep up. Like it is hard to keep up with how fast, like I gotta say, you know, for any CIO that's listening, man, it'd be hard to make decisions these days. Like really, because it it it's it's such a fragmented landscape. And I don't think any of us have it end-to-end solved. Like we're certainly trying to solve more of the problem to simplify that. But I have a lot of sympathy, you know, empathy. I was in those uh similar shoes for a long time, trying to make decisions with customers on on how they were gonna spend their money. And um, man, it's hard these days to get to the right thing because everything's moving so fast.

SPEAKER_00: 35:02

Placing the right bets is really tricky because things move so quickly. But actually, one thing that you can be certain of, one of the questions I got asked is what are the things that you are certain that are not gonna change, which is a really good way to think of things. And the answer is Cisco ain't changing in is as in in terms of you need Cisco. That ain't changing. It's a great bet. So when you're making a decision, even all the investment that we're putting in, we could acquire you could go and invest in all this different infrastructure. It's like actually the easiest decision is to go, well, we're very comfortable with what Cisco is doing. We know they're gonna be there. We have to have connectivity. That is a very, very simple bet, which is why I think that you're in a really good position. Lots of the other companies, whilst frothy, maybe a good bet. They might not be there in a bit. It's so hard. Like imagine trying to pick your AI model to build your company on. Well, which one is it? Is it OpenAI? Is it Llama? Is it this? It's you know, is it X AI? You know, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01: 35:57

You you want a little bit of investment protection, right? And you can either go place bets across a bunch of different vendors, or you can place bets with one who has Brett, such that if one isn't the right one and things turn left, there's another one that you know is gonna pay off, right? Like at the end of the day, you know, our our size and scope, I mentioned this earlier. It's a double-edged sword, right? There are things that it allows us to do for our customers at breadth. It means we may not be the fastest and the narrower capabilities, but I would never bet against us getting caught up on the ones that really stick and that really add value. Um, it's I love our competition pushing us on that. We're not always going to get there the right way. Our customers do a great job of pushing us on that as well. Um, but I do think that's one of the advantages we've got as we as we look forward. I think it's one of the advantages you all have as you look across the different cloud players is that being the glue that helps to really connect and enable services across all of them, the way that you all do, I think is a it has great staying power. And I'm I'm certainly excited about that. I'm excited about how it fits with our capabilities and what it's gonna do for our customers.

SPEAKER_00: 37:06

Thank you, a legend. Really appreciate having you on the Uplink podcast. Uh great to chat. I'll catch you in San Diego. Um awesome, man. Cheers. Thanks. Thanks for having me. I can't wait to see you. Um and uh we'll talk soon.