Michael van Rooyen:
0:00
Welcome to a special Cisco Live edition of Securely Connected Everything. I was fortunate enough to spend a better part of a week with Cisco for the annual APJC Cisco Live event held in Melbourne each year. During that week, I had the opportunity to catch up with a lot of interesting people from Cisco, of course, but also from across the technology industry. The great news for listeners of the podcast is that I got to record many of those conversations at our Oro Live podcasting booth, which we had set up on site throughout Cisco Live. You’ll get to hear a number of those discussions next season when we kick off in late January 2025. I couldn’t wait to Len to bring in today’s guest, though, so we’re bringing him to you now as a special two-part Cisco Live edition of Securely Connected Everything. Without further ado, here is part one of my discussion with Cisco and ZCTO Carl Solder.
Michael van Rooyen:
0:48
Today I have the pleasure in having a discussion with Carl Solder, who is the CTO of Australia, new Zealand, for Cisco Systems. He’s been at Cisco for a long time and he’ll certainly cover that in our discussion, but we’re at Cisco Live able to get some time with Carl and we’re going to really talk about all things that’s happening in industry, what Carl’s seeing across customers and the region, as well as all things that Cisco’s pushing forward in. Carl, welcome, thank you for having me. I really appreciate the time, as I said, but before we get started, for those who don’t know you, who are outside of the circles, who listen into this, do you mind just spending a little bit of time about your career journey and what led you to become the CTO of Australian Museum for Cisco? Sure.
Carl Solder:
1:28
Graduate of Curtin University which was formerly West Australian Institute of Technology. Back in the day, Computer programming as it was known then, now software engineering. 11 years in IBM and coming up 28 years in Cisco.
Carl Solder:
1:41
I started in Cisco in the mid-1990s when Cisco was setting up sales offices around Australia, I was the second engineer in Perth to start. I started off in sales as a systems engineer In 2002, I had the opportunity to get hired by the engineering teams out of the US. So I spent 19 years working in engineering. I started off working on what was, I think now, arguably the most successful product Cisco’s brought to market, which was the Catalyst 6500 switch. Fantastic device, billions and millions of dollars of revenue. But that was my stomping grounds in the early days. But I started off working over there in the engineering team and eventually ended up, just before I left, leading a team of about nearly 200 engineers working in the enterprise networking business. So we were responsible for Catalyst 9,000 switches, catalyst 8,000 routers, the Catalyst Enterprise wireless portfolio, dnac as it was then, but now Catalyst Center, the Viptela acquisition which is now Catalyst SD-WAN Identity Services Engine, so a whole host of kind of mainstream enterprise products. So we were responsible for product strategy and technical strategy defining what we were going to build, what we were going to create next to service the needs of customers in the market and then figuring out how to build as best a product as we could.
Carl Solder:
3:03
But I had a bit of a life reset in the pandemic and decided that it was time to come back to Australia. So I actually decided to retire. I left Cisco, hung up my boots, moved back and a couple of months in I got a call from the Cisco country manager, ben Dawson. He said, hey, how would you like to come back? So they opened up a role as CTO. He said, hey, how would you like to come back? So they opened up a role as CTO and I joined just short of three years ago, february 2022.
Michael van Rooyen:
3:36
And I’ve been serving as the chief technology officer for Cisco Australia, new Zealand ever since. Wow, that’s a fantastic career and I think about just at the heart of everything you’ve done there. It’s really digital plumbing, right. I mean, if I think about those life cycles, I mean that was Cisco’s bread and butter and you’ve lived that whole life cycle. It is A bit of a pause, which was probably fortuitous, because today, if you think about where Cisco’s life cycle is going, you know, if I really reflect where you guys are today you’re really back at that early 90s, late 90s, kind of that’s the feeling right there. There’s a lots happened, of course, and we’ve got ai, which no doubt we’ll touch on lots of connectivity. You know the world’s continued to be hyper connected, etc. So it’s probably a good time to to be a digital plumber as, so to speak and and uh, you know, our industry’s fascinating never stops changing, right it doesn’t.
Carl Solder:
4:17
That’s one thing that I have learned in my entire career. Change is the constant, so every time you think you’re just getting comfortable with the latest bit of tech, a couple of weeks later you turn your head and there’s something new you have to learn about. So you’re absolutely right.
Michael van Rooyen:
4:31
And that just continues to evolve so much. What do you mean by that is? We used to be able to pick through these tranches of you know switching, and then we did wireless and then voice and you know kind of map those TDM to IP telephony. You know all these phases but today, as you just said, there’s so many that are happening so quickly. It can be two or three at the same time.
Carl Solder:
4:47
It’s faster, yes. So that’s the other observation I’ve made. Just the pace of innovation, not only from Cisco, but just the industry overall, is moving at a very fast pace, and I think one of the biggest challenges that most customers I speak to is how can we consume this, how can we take advantage of it? And just being first of all, being aware, yes. Once you’re aware, then how do you consume, yes, and how can you actually use this to drive better productivity, better experience for customers, better profitability for the business they’re all questions that customers are always asking.
Michael van Rooyen:
5:17
Yeah, yeah, and because we are catching up at Cisco Live and I know that you’re involved globally with your teams, et cetera, and spend a lot of time talking to the US and the innovation and you lived, as you said in the intro, around driving innovation. While we’re here at Cisco Live Melbourne today, what are some of the most exciting announcements or some of the innovations that Cisco’s kind of introducing? You guys normally release a few things at Cisco Live in the US and then trickle through to here we do. We do.
Carl Solder:
5:43
Look, there’s actually quite a lot to wrap your arms around. Yes, so I think Cisco’s focus and you saw, if you saw the keynote there were three areas of focus AI-ready data centers, future-proof workspace and digital resilience and they kind of sit in the front of a whole host of innovations that we’re bringing to market. And they kind of sit in the front of a whole host of innovations that we’re bringing to market In the background, in my old world, when I tend to have a mindset more from an engineering side, I think about the developments, the products we’re bringing to market. We are reimagining our security portfolio. Yes, so we announced Cisco Security Cloud a little while ago. We’ve got a whole host of innovations related to improving security posture for organizations. Hypershield is probably the big one that we announced this year. That represents a brand new way in which you can protect your applications Identity intelligence all about protecting you against session hijacking. That’s another one We’ve introduced. In addition to that, on the collaboration side, you might have seen new collaboration devices, new ceiling microphones, room designers.
Carl Solder:
6:49
We’re recognizing that in this world of hybrid work. We actually published a hybrid work report earlier this year and we, I think, polled some 14,000 employees, a huge number of employers, but we saw some interesting statistics 80% of those organizations were looking to either mandate a full or partial return to the office yes, but 50% of those organizations didn’t have their workspace set up to really accommodate the kind of cubes. Yes, I hate the cubes, and what we’re seeing, certainly in the US, and I think certainly we’re starting to see this here in Australia is the reimagination of the workspace, and so when you do that, you start building more collaborative areas, but in tandem with that, you also need to have the right tech to be able to support that. Yes, and so that’s a second area of innovation that Cisco is also working on. We’re also developing new innovations on the cloud side, and that’s kind of driven partly by the continued adoption of cloud and also the adoption of AI. So we bring in a market pods that you can run your custom workloads on. We’re doing things in the visibility space with Thousand Eyes, for example.
Carl Solder:
8:01
We recognize that between the user and the cloud, where the application is, there’s many touch points that potentially could be problematic, and, especially with businesses digitizing their front ends, that demand to drive as close to 100% availability as possible means that when something goes blip, something goes wrong. It’s all action stations and what can we do to identify where the problem is? If you think about a user rings up and says I can’t access my application as a help desk operator, is it a problem with the device the person’s using? Is it a problem with the Wi-Fi? Is it a problem in the LAN? Is it a problem in the WAN with my ISP? Is it a problem in the cloud of my application? Where do you start looking? So having the tool sets to be able to zero in and give that help desk operator a head start in identifying the problem so they can remediate it. They’re all the innovations that we bring into market, and Splunk is part of that. Data is going to be a key metric in that conversation. The more data you have, the more you can see.
Carl Solder:
8:56
The more you can see, the more you can action. So there’s a method behind Cisco’s madness of acquiring Splunk, but that’s all going to be fed into the observability tool. So madness of acquiring Splunk, yes, but that’s all going to be fed into the observability tool. So data represents a really important part of our strategy moving forward. So there’s a lot going on, as I said. Security we’ve got the new AI assistants that are coming out. That represents a brand new paradigm for how an operator goes about enacting workflows. If you think, in the past it used to be CLI. I love my CLI and, in fact, all the customers still like their CLI. They find it hard to extract themselves from that. But we’ve moved to the notion of controls and dashboards using beautiful GUIs to simplify workflows. But now you’re getting a chat GPT style interface where you’re initiating prompts to enact workflows and not having to click on any buttons at all. That’s a brand new paradigm that I think customers are going to start seeing more and more, not only from Cisco, but from everyone else in the industry.
Michael van Rooyen:
9:54
Yep.
Carl Solder:
9:54
So there’s just so much going on right now. It’s exciting, but it’s also a little bit overwhelming.
Michael van Rooyen:
9:59
It would be. Yeah, look, I mean that’s a lot to digest and also the dynamics of, probably, the new engineers. We touched on CLI, a group of CLI. You know showing our ages and you know cloud management. You know all these great benefits. But with all this AI investment and all this AI drive, you know we’re going to have new engineers that are going to just expect that to be the case right, and the simplified and asking the question.
Michael van Rooyen:
10:23
I guess a side note would be I think we’re going to have a potential gap in troubleshooting, you know, because you have this AI automation, which is fantastic. But I think that the lack of understanding the root cause of the problem might be an outcome of these changes. But it is super exciting, right. New product, lots of innovation. You touched on collaboration. You know, return to work’s a big one, right.
Carl Solder:
10:42
Even just the plumbing to support that has had a refresh because no one spent money on it, because everyone was at home, right, yes, we actually have a what we like to think it’s a work place template for the future Our sales office in Midtown Matten in New York, affectionately called One Pen Plaza. We went through a massive retrofit in that floor space and we converted the floor space from being 70% cubes and 30% collaborative space. We flipped it to 70% collaboration and 30% cubes. We actually seen a 40% increase in the number of employees we can actually get back in the office and during the pandemic everyone kind of went home. But we’ve seen a 300% increase in employees coming back to the office because of the environment and the workspace that we’ve built, which is very conducive and alluring to actually wanting to come back and doing work.
Carl Solder:
11:33
But it’s founded a whole bunch of collaboration technology but there’s also a lot of the actual endpoints that you have in the building, which is driving another area of interest for customers around net zero and sustainability and energy consumption, or reducing energy consumption and reducing emissions where we are connecting lights, reducing emissions where we are connecting lights, cameras, audio, window shades, hot desks, usb ports, you plug your laptops in and they’re all powered by PoE. And when we power it via PoE we have an ability to understand energy consumption and we can modulate and control that. So, like, if users leave a room, we can detect through the network that someone’s left the room, we can turn the lights off. If they didn’t turn the lights off, we can lower the air conditioning down, we can drop window shades. So we’re moving towards this notion of smart buildings, yes, or programmable buildings, yes. That’s another area that we’re kind of looking at, but the collaboration technology we’re building marries up with that very, very nicely.
Michael van Rooyen:
12:35
Wow, wow and I just think about that. That’s a sustainability discussion, right, and it’s driven by technology. One of the key things I’d love you to touch on is knowing that you spend so much time with customers of all varying sizes and different industries, and I know that your passion around innovation and innovating and simplifying complex technologies, because we’ve grown up with a lot of complexity and we’re obviously having this nice trajectory down towards simplification, with a lot of smart technology behind the scenes. But how does your role allow you to, you know, have a bit of impact in the direction of Cisco and what sort of conversations you’re having with customers? What are the key things?
Carl Solder:
13:12
So I’ll answer that in two ways. Sure, one part in terms of the role I did in the US and how I take advantage of that insight in my current role.
Michael van Rooyen:
13:23
Yes.
Carl Solder:
13:23
So the role I had in the US, as I said, was focused on product and technical strategy. Product strategy is ultimately deciding what we’re going to be building next. When we decide, or in deciding what we’re going to be building next, there’s a lot of inputs. There’s, for example, what our competitors are doing, what are new research projects that are going on that might have a bearing on what we want to do, asks from customers, asks from partners, research that we’re doing internally ourselves on trying to solve problems for our customers. So we take all these inputs to formulate a product strategy. Now, part of what we did was we also solicit input from our field. So systems engineers, account managers, product sales specialists we do poll those individuals and we get some input from them.
Carl Solder:
14:08
Now, in my current role, knowing what I know about the way the engineering engine works, and because I actually know a lot of the individuals who are deciding and building that product strategy a part of my role I like to think of myself as the voice of the Australian, new Zealand customer.
Carl Solder:
14:27
So in my role, I do get to travel a lot, I do get to meet with a lot of customers, a lot of partners, and I probably unlike a lot of my peers who work on segments of the market, like I might be a healthcare sales specialist, I might be working on the enterprise or the commercial or small business. I look at everything. So I build up a unique perspective of, I guess, inputs that I hear from customers and I channel that back to my former colleagues in the US my former colleagues in the US and I’m pretty forceful around that because I like to champion what I think is going to be needed for the Australian customers and I work with the engineering teams to make sure that the voice of customers here is actually heard and is factored into that product strategy.
Michael van Rooyen:
15:11
Yeah, and with those discussions is there a common theme and I know there’s probably so many angles because of the criticality of all our connectivity and cybernet but is there one kind of key discussion that’s really dominating your current discussions? Look at a high level.
Carl Solder:
15:26
There’s a couple of things that I think customers’ interests really at the moment artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and the. I guess how to drive more efficiencies, operational efficiency, reduce operator burden, do more with less that’s kind of a common question, but ultimately it drives down to how can I make the network simpler? Yes, simplicity counts and, I think, something that sometimes gets lost in translation. Engineers get excited. They have all these wonderful ideas and they go off and build all these wonderful things and sometimes we tend to forget the basics. We kind of work on everything. But. And for customers?
Carl Solder:
16:09
Yes, all these new innovations are quite exciting and they absolutely address solving problems in the business. But for the IT practitioner it’s how can I get things done more quickly? If a problem pops up, how can I resolve that more quickly? If I’m going to maybe upgrade some software or I’m going to apply a patch or I’m going to do some configuration, how can I get it done in a more timely manner without all the fuss? That’s ultimately what customers are all about and if you think, historically, we’ve gone through software-defined networking that had the promise of simplifying networks, cloud computing, taking away the need to have to worry about compute infrastructure as a service platform as a service, software as a service, taking infrastructure away. I don’t have to worry about racking and stacking and cabling and upgrading software. Those things were all attempts, but even though we’ve got all of that in play, customers still say it’s still complex. Yes, so there’s still opportunities for companies like Cisco to think about how we can continue to innovate, to drive further simplicity.
Carl Solder:
17:10
That’s ultimately, I think what we’ve started to recognize, that if we can get those basics right, then we’re going to make our customers happy.
Michael van Rooyen:
17:17
Yeah, and look for me having a look at Partner Summit and also Cisco Live today and the key messaging. Cisco went through this transition of incredible engineering, some of the stuff you’re involved in 6500, you touched on an amazing product all the way through to where we are today. To where we are today. Probably the biggest feeling I’m getting out of Cisco is this whole idea of this end-to-end solutioning better together real drive and security, how we bring all these components together so that you have this better ecosystem and someone kind of related to other products where they work better together. Can you just touch on that, because I’m really picking that as a big thing as opposed to these silos that everyone used to deal with Yep.
Carl Solder:
17:54
So I think the silo thing is something that’s manifested itself out across the industry. You look at multi-vendor environments. You have the best firewall, you have the best phone system, you have the best switch, you have the best access point, and when you patch it together it becomes more challenging.
Carl Solder:
18:11
I think, one thing that I observed in the US maybe customers saw the realization a bit ahead of where Australian customers have seen this is the difference between OPEX and CAPEX. So if you think back to why do we build silos? Because it was focused on who built the biggest, the best, the cheapest, and so you ended up building all these best of breed individual products, but as you start to stitch them together to your point, the OPEX side becomes much larger. Now in the US we had this. I think a lot of customers I spoke to had this rule of thumb that for every dollar you spend on CapEx, you spend $10 on OPEX. So the question we would pose to them is if we can save you 20% on CapEx versus 20% on OPEX, what would you prefer? And it’s absolutely OPEX, of course. So, while you might spend a little bit more on individual products, but if they work together better as a system and you can save more money on the OPEX side, that’s what customers want. So that’s this notion and this direction to move towards platforms.
Carl Solder:
19:17
Yep, and certainly Cisco has recognized that. And while we’ve built best-of-breed vertical stacks, like you look at, for example, if you’re looking at a cloud stack, you might have Nexus. You’re looking at a WAN stack. You might have the Catalyst SD-WAN. These are discrete stacks from the controller to the devices, the OS it kind of is verticalized. But can we build something that has better horizontal integration? That’s what we’re starting to do. We’ve probably taken the lead there on the security side with the security cloud, and we’ve also got an initiative and a strategy on the networking side known as the Cisco Networking Cloud, where we’re going to start doing that horizontal integration drive better platform integration. Again, focus on reducing operator burden and improvements in operational simplicity.
Michael van Rooyen:
20:04
Yeah, yeah, and look, I think it’s a fantastic journey and if I think about the breadth of products that the portfolio has, bringing that all together, it really is that amazing ecosystem. And whilst historically people had you had two camps, it was opposed to end-to-end single vendor best of breed. You know, let’s choose the best file. In fact, we even you, would be familiar with architectures where we even have double firewalls as an example. But it’d be two vendors to do the same thing and that has lots of challenges alone. But I think the world is getting more comfortable in relation to having it all under one umbrella, having it all under one banner, one management platform. It’s an incredible long journey. It’s been a vision for a while, but I think it’s nice to see it coming to fruition. Now it does.
Carl Solder:
20:44
And it comes back to that CapEx OpEx thing. You might have to spend a little bit more money and it might be that you don’t get the best of breed of everything. But if you get better integration end to end, that’s going to yield a better outcome for operators, and I use apple as probably the best example in the industry yes, you know, my family has apple everything except for my son, who has an android phone.
Carl Solder:
21:04
So no facetime. Yes, you know, no iMessage. There’s things that, like, you don’t quite get, and so it becomes just that little bit more difficult, but when you’re inside that ecosystem, everything’s seamless, of course, and so that’s, I think, what customers are starting to recognize that if they stick to an ecosystem, they can drive better outcomes.
Michael van Rooyen:
21:25
Yeah, 100%.
Michael van Rooyen:
21:27
In the conversation a little bit you touched on AI and we’ll have to talk about it because it’s so topical and your customers are talking about it, and 18 months ago it would have been a different conversation we’re probably having today, and you talked about a lot of the integration that the team’s doing around AI bots and AI tools to simplify the operation, as you said. But can you just talk a little bit more about? Earlier you touched on one of the key pillars is AI data centers, or building for AI data centers. Do you mind that’s a really interesting area for us? I’m keen to hear about that.
Carl Solder:
21:54
So Cisco, its AI strategy is really centered around a few aspects. There is the infrastructure piece. So that is compute, that’s storage, that’s networking. It’s what are we doing to build the infrastructure that’s going to allow customers to run their custom AI workloads. So there, you’re talking about compute platforms with heavily loaded with GPUs. You’re talking about high bandwidth, high speed Ethernet 400 gig, 800 gig. Moving to the future, where it will be terribly expensive, plus, yes, and getting that infrastructure right so that consumer customers can actually run their our workloads. So we’re heavily focused on that.
Carl Solder:
22:31
It’s centered around our silicon one technology, silicon one is foundational to that partnering with industry vendors like amd, like nvidia, like intel. Those organizations are going to have technologies that will integrate into that infrastructure. Yes, to bring that to life. The other areas that we’re also looking at is the embedding the ai in our solutions. So you’re off the shelf solution you take advantage of. Show us a I don’t know market dashboard, for example. It has radio resource management in the back, ai monitoring, adjusting, fine tuning your wi-fi settings without the operator having to do anything, and then you have the new emerging AI assistance, which is changing the operational paradigm. So while we kind of front and center and talk about AI-ready data centers, that is a heavy focus on the AI infrastructure that we’re building. I also, as a CTO, I try to make sure customers don’t forget that there’s also other aspects to our AI journey that can also benefit them as well. Yeah, sure, sure.
Michael van Rooyen:
23:30
I guess you’re in a good position there, right? People are going to need lots of infrastructure for this and as well as, how do you grapple it internally to make sure people are getting the best out of the products? And I think about the data sets that you have available. You know you’ve got such network, cyber, collaboration, all this endpoint, the thousandized data. It’s just incredible how we could use those data sets to really drive the outcome. What I’d be keen to get from your point of view as well, as we talk a lot and I’ll lead to a second section to this question, but we’re seeing a lot of customers needing to go back to having workloads remote or close to the edge.
Michael van Rooyen:
24:03
That probably leads a bit to IoT, which we’ll touch on in a minute, but I’m also seeing that maybe a little bit in the AI, not a full workload. We need massive data centers, lots of power. Are you seeing the same sort of trajectory? A little bit of compute was going to the cloud, but now, coming back a bit, we are. We are.
Carl Solder:
24:15
So actually I was part of a set of CR roundtables early this year country manager from idc who was there guest speaking and they had mentioned some research that they did. It was posted middle of the year. Based on their survey, 80 of organizations they polled said that they’d be repatriating some or most of their workloads and data.
Carl Solder:
24:38
But back on prem right right and it’s actually I think I don’t know it’s necessarily going to go from 100 to 0. I kind of talk about it as rebalancing there’s for a multitude of reasons there’s compliance, there’s sovereignty, there’s latency, there’s cost, there’s skills, there’s security, and I’ve spoken to quite a few customers here in Australia who are quote repatriating, and one of those areas is AI. So AI obviously very compute intensive. If it’s compute intensive, you know that it’s going to cost a bit of money. I actually refer customers to an interesting article that got posted, probably about three years ago, by Andresen Horowitz, which is one of the biggest VCs on the planet.
Carl Solder:
25:22
And it was authored by a guy called Martin Casado. Martin Casado was a PhDd student at stanford. He invented sdn software defined networking. He also invented openflow right. He created a startup called nysera, got bought by vmware for over a billion dollars and that ended up becoming what is now known as nsx.
Carl Solder:
25:39
But he works for andres and horowitz and he did he did this study on cost of the cloud he actually his article the Trillion Dollar Cloud Paradox, but he actually has an interesting quote which I call out to customers and I normally get a smile, and the quote is you’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud, but you’re crazy if you stay on it.
Carl Solder:
26:03
Right, but you’re crazy if you stay on it, right. And his argument is that the flexibility and the elasticity of cloud and the cost metrics is really great when you’re starting off. Yes, but for many organizations that they’ve spoken to and in fact it kind of holds true with some customers I’ve spoken to as well that the cost benefit analysis that they did right at the beginning of their cloud journey doesn’t necessarily marry up to the actual costs that they’re bearing right now, right. So there is that desire from IT leaders to find ways to trim or refine their cloud costs, and we’ve had discussions with some customers who’ve done kind of a new cost benefit analysis and said, hey, actually it will be cheaper for us to run it on-prem than it will be for us to continue running the cloud. So there’s some things that work well in the cloud.
Carl Solder:
26:54
Yes, there’s also some applications and workloads that might actually be better to run on-prem, and ai is one of those. It’s a great, maybe start off your ai journey, but if you’re going to be serious about running AI, then maybe there’s an opportunity to consider running it on-prem. And we’ve started to see more so globally not so much in Australia as organizations are now starting to dip their toes into actually building and putting into production AI-enabled workflows. A good percentage of those are now starting to see that being run locally or outside of in a private cloud as opposed to being in the public cloud. So I think over the coming months and years it’s going to be interesting to see where the industry and customers’ heads are going to be at. But there’s definitely a momentum in some parts of the customer base where they’re reassessing where they’re going to be running.
Michael van Rooyen:
27:48
Yeah, look, I completely agree and I see that as well. I think I see it in a couple of dimensions. First of all, some customers and I really like your thing about starting in the cloud and not necessarily stay there. I think we’re going to end up with hybrid AI if that’s a new term, maybe, but effectively I’m also seeing customers’ mindsets say all these tools that have been developed that are in cloud and you can ask questions and you get these fantastic results and you can do drawings and videos and all that great stuff, right. I’m also seeing customers saying well, we need to understand that we need to build our own LLMs and of our own data, and the perception is that that should be on-prem, because I need to know where it contained it and own it and everything whilst I’m on the cloud. So I think there’s that dimension on the physical aspect.
Michael van Rooyen:
28:28
Second part is that you’re right. Not all workloads need to be in the cloud to do that right. You don’t need a mass scale. So much compute and performance is happening at the edge, you can probably get the right results for businesses at the closest or far edge. And then last dimension to that is the IoT play right. How do we ingest data to that? Iot is going to be one of the big feeds into AI models. So we’re seeing a lot of customers look at that.
Carl Solder:
28:49
I think there’s something else which is of interest, and that’s the general move towards building smaller language models. Yes, the small language models, the micro language models, the domain specific language models, the ability to potentially run a model on a laptop or a tablet.
Carl Solder:
29:04
Yes, that opens up a whole range of opportunities that you might not be able to necessarily build with a more generic large language model. So I think there’s so much. I actually was talking to someone recently and I kind of think of AI like the iPhone. When the iPhone came out in 2007, it was a very different device then to what it is today 100% and I don’t think back then people fully appreciated the potential of what that could do. And when you think back then you couldn’t do online banking, you couldn’t order your pizza, you couldn’t check where the bus was, couldn’t do your banking those use cases kind of got derived on that journey. And I think the same thing with AI. We’re at that moment where we know there’s a lot of potential, but I don’t think we truly realize exactly what it potentially can do, and I think that will be discovered.
Michael van Rooyen:
29:54
I hope you enjoyed part one of my discussion with Carl Solder. Cisco ANZ CTO. Tune in next week for part two of the special Cisco Live edition of Securely Connected Everything.
