Michael van Rooyen:
0:00
Today we’re bringing you part two of my discussion with Cisco ANZ CTO Carl Solder. If you haven’t listened to part one of the special Cisco live edition of Securely Connected Everything, I recommend you do so first. Do you mind just touching on again? I know that you’ve got plenty of coverage, but you know what’s really happening in the IoT space. I mean, we we ourselves have invested quite heavily into building an OT practice to help with the digital transformation journey. Security, because that’s SOC-y act and all that sort of stuff. Can you just touch on a few minutes on what you’re seeing with customers in that space?
Carl Solder:
0:35
Yeah, so we have a dedicated engineering team that’s focused on building products for the IoT space.
Carl Solder:
0:41
We’ve gone through a number of convergence cycles. In my history IBM IP SNA was converged, it was then voice. In the early 2000s it was video. We’re now in the I guess, the IT-OT convergence. This motion has been around for some time.
Carl Solder:
1:00
I think the challenge that we have as an industry is that OT devices don’t necessarily play to the same rules that IT devices play.
Carl Solder:
1:08
They have different technology stacks, not necessarily always IP, so you have a slightly different thinking and approach on how you integrate those devices. There’s the more generic things around, like hardened devices running in harsh environments, which you know iot teams build. But in terms of being able to identify, fingerprint, secure, protect those devices and also interrogate, and from a visibility standpoint it’s a little bit challenging. So what cisco is doing is that we are focusing on three things the connect how can we connect those devices, how can we protect and how we can observe, because anytime you add any device onto a network it represents a new attack surface for threat actors out there. To look to compromise and OT, I think is the kind of bit of the wild west where IT practitioners are still trying to wrap their minds around how they can bring those devices in and protect and observe them in the same manner they do with traditional IT devices. So that’s the challenge that we have as an organization what can we do? What innovations can we bring to market that can make that easier?
Michael van Rooyen:
2:22
to happen. To round out our technical aspect here, do you mind just touching on you, talk about observability. Can we just talk about observability, because I think that’s so fundamental of one of your thousand hours acquisition, you’ve got Splunk, of course. Appdynx all these and I think people haven’t really probably pieced together, hand-porned those. Even us, we’ve aligned ourselves well with your observability space into our platforms. Do you just mind talking a bit about how quick resolution, provability, all that Is it so important? Yeah, look.
Carl Solder:
2:51
I kind of alluded to it early on. But in digitizing your business and this demand by the business that digital front-end is going to be available as close to 100% as possible, you need the tool sets to identify and then remediate. You want to minimize if there’s a problem. You want to be able to minimize that amount of time. So the more data you have, the more you see, the more you can act on ultimately. So the Splunk acquisition was made purely for that. We see data being absolutely critical to our long-term strategy. That observability piece being able to understand exactly what’s happening end-to-end from the user to the application, everything in between is absolutely critical.
Carl Solder:
3:30
So Splunk brings in two tool sets right. There’s the observability tool sets and there’s also the security tool sets and the data kind of feeds. Both of those there’s security, incident event management and there’s SOAR applications and then there’s just general observability platforms. Cisco had started on that journey before we bought Splunk. We’ve actually merged the developments we had with our full-stack observability tool sets with Splunk, so that’s kind of combined. We’ve moved our AppDynamics tool sets into Splunk so that forms part of their APM, their Application Performance Monitoring tool set. We’re now starting to look at how we bring the ThousandEyes and the other security tool sets and the data that we share, how we can interoperate with Splunk as well. So on the security side, for example, we recently announced that the telemetry that we can pull from our Extended Detection and response XDR service we can make available to users who might be using SIEM and vice versa.
Carl Solder:
4:29
XDR can also pull so more about how we can share telemetry to provide greater visibility across more use cases. The Thousand Eyes is the other one. As a networking guy, I love that product. It is amazing how you can visualize all the points between the user and the application, literally from this one endpoint to another endpoint, and I can’t tell you the number of times I was in a call. One time where an engineer was doing a demo of Thousand Eyes to a customer and just at that time the customer got a call from one of their teams saying this service is down and our engineer was engineer was like oh, I can check that and tell you.
Carl Solder:
5:09
He pulled it up and said all your problems with this ISP it’s on this device. And that was golden moment I mean opportune for us, because it helped the customer there but showed them the power of what the customer needed and what they needed to do, and these tool sets can do and the customer’s like man that’s awesome, absolutely.
Michael van Rooyen:
5:25
I mean for those who are coming from traditional network troubleshooting and everything like that being able to see it is it’s just incredible right trace routes.
Carl Solder:
5:32
You don’t have to worry about that anymore unbelievable.
Michael van Rooyen:
5:34
Unbelievable. Pivoting a little bit away from the technology and knowing that you’ve been, you know, leading teams for a long time and obviously in your, in your role today and being a cto myself, I’m keen to understand your thoughts here. But the role of our CTO is always evolving it always has been, et cetera. But we also see things like chief AI office coming along, chief these other areas as the industry evolves. But with the rapid pace of this technology change, how do you see our roles, or CTO roles, driving innovation and influencing business strategy? Do you think it’s changing or becoming more fundamental? I’ve seen some arguments that the CTO is as important as the CEO. Considering we’re becoming such a tech-led world. I’m keen on your thoughts on this.
Carl Solder:
6:12
No, I would tend to agree. I think, as organizations utilize IT services more, I think it’s becoming more foundational to running the business. I can’t actually think of many businesses that don’t have or don’t use technology to support them. So in that sense, I think being aware of how technology can be used to support the business, but also being aware of new trends, new developments that can further potentially drive differentiation for that business in the market against their peers, is absolutely important.
Carl Solder:
6:49
I’ve seen more CTOs popping up in organizations over time. If I go back, maybe seven, eight years ago not as many. It’s becoming a more common role in organizations. To your point, chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, I was starting to see those things pop up as well. Yes, but certainly I think the CTO role is paramount. You need to have a good understanding because the pace of innovation is moving so fast. If you blink, you miss. Yes, and it’s on the CTO to keep across all the technologies and how they might benefit the organization, and being able to provide that input into business strategies is going to be foundational to the survival of businesses moving forward.
Michael van Rooyen:
7:31
Yeah, completely agreed and as a leader within Cisco, what kind of the principles do you believe are essential to fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement? I mean, you guys have got a massive team globally and there’s lots of innovation. You’ve got a whole skunkworks which I’d love to see one day, but you keep coming up with these ideas that there must be a secret room somewhere. But I’d love to hear what you guys are doing in that space, or yourself, In terms of developing people. Yeah, yeah, and continuous improvement for people and innovation, driving innovation right.
Carl Solder:
7:57
Yeah, I think as a leader you should talk fair enough because I used to lead a team it was at one point close to 200 individuals. Everyone has ideas and I think it’s important that you give everyone a voice, because it doesn’t necessarily some of your more learned engineers. They might be your go-to people, but sometimes having and thinking outside the nine dots and someone not having the baggage of the way things have been done in the past, fresh ideas is also good and actually I can tell historically in my situation. There have actually been some innovations that have been spawned from some of the junior engineers who come and say like why the heck are we doing this?
Carl Solder:
8:40
Why don’t we do it that way? And it’s like actually, yeah, you’re right, that’s a good idea. Yes, so I think listening is really really important. Open communication, giving people that platform or that opportunity to speak, I think is also important. And just respecting other people’s ideas as well yeah, not shutting them down too quickly. I think that’s that’s key.
Michael van Rooyen:
8:59
Very important and well said. Reflecting, then more on the organization, cisco is obviously a massive entity, you know, and so fundamental to a lot of the globe’s organizations, et cetera, and the tech industry, as you just said, really, you know, pop up and next thing there’s two things behind you that are new and there’s always the what’s coming on the left field. But how does Cisco themselves stay agile, you know, being such a large entity, particularly with these emerging technologies and shift in customer demands? It’s tough, it’s not easy, it’s very tough.
Carl Solder:
9:27
So again, when I was in engineering, we would have teams that would be out. We call them go-to-market teams, so they would go out, meet with customers, share news around new technologies and new ideas that we’ve got, but we would solicit a whole bunch of feedback. We’ve also got R&D teams who are just coming up with these ideas and building and prototyping and trying things out and seeing is this relevant? We might take some of those ideas and then showcase them to a select few customers and say, hey, we’ve got this thing. What do you think? Is this going to be relevant? Does it have applicability in your business? We collectively get a lot of information from the field our sales teams, account managers, product sales specialists. We hold these sync-ups a couple of times a year where we just ask questions like what are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are your customers wanting?
Carl Solder:
10:19
We try to take a whole lot of inputs. We also see, obviously, what competitors are doing. We want to keep up with our competitors. We’re also keeping across trends that are happening in and across the market. We have alliance teams. We have these teams who continue looking at what startups are doing.
Carl Solder:
10:33
Cisco themselves have a fund that we invest in startups, and so we have startups coming to us, pitching to us all the time on new ideas so it’s a collection of all of this that we use to then synthesize what are we going to do, and part of it is obviously meeting the needs of customers, but sometimes you also have to create new things that customers are not even asking. Right, right yeah.
Michael van Rooyen:
10:59
You’ve got to drive something brand new. Yeah, of course.
Carl Solder:
11:02
So it’s going to be a mix.
Michael van Rooyen:
11:04
Yeah, yeah, and considering the breadth of people that you come across, and there’s a new generation of people wanting to get into the industry and we’ve been through the cycles of.
Michael van Rooyen:
11:11
I want to be a network guy, and the CCI used to be the thing to be, and then it became cyber. I want to be a cyber guy without doing networking. That’s AI et cetera. But we also tend to see a new breed of leaders coming through that we’ve got to think about as we hand the keys over in the long term. What advice would you give aspiring tech leaders who are wanting to make a significant impact in the fields of network, cyber, automation, everything we’re doing, yeah, look.
Carl Solder:
11:33
I think it’s an interesting one. In my journey, I don’t think I’ve ever stopped learning.
Carl Solder:
11:40
So I think if you get into this career, you’ve got to be prepared that you’re going to be reading, you’re going to be watching videos. Every time that you learn something, you realize that there’s a whole lot more that you need to learn. It can get overwhelming sometimes. I’ve had moments in my career where I thought man, this is just too hard. So I think you’ve got to have a positive attitude. You’ve got to have a willingness to want to learn. You also have to have a willingness to want to learn. You also have to have a willingness to try to make mistakes.
Carl Solder:
12:10
You learn by making mistakes, but I think just generally it’s one thing which I I I kind of struggle with a little bit right now is and you kind of alluded to this the when I first networking was the in thing.
Michael van Rooyen:
12:26
Yes.
Carl Solder:
12:27
That was one of the best, I guess, roles you could get. But over time, as we’ve evolved into all these other areas, cyber for a while was the darling of everyone. Ai is now the darling of everyone. You can’t forget the basics because guess what, when you open up your phone and you try to connect to your Facebook or your Snapchat or wherever, if that connection is not working, then you’re no good. I remember my son telling me one time he was studying in San Diego On a hot summer it was leading into summer the air conditioning in the dorm went down. The same time the Wi-Fi went down, and was everyone complaining about the air conditioning?
Carl Solder:
13:07
no, everyone’s complaining about the fact that they didn’t have their internet access. Yes, so I actually would argue that, even though networking might not be the in thing, it’s so fundamental, yeah, and so important that that’s something that I think everyone should be at least aware of. Yes, and it’s an area that still has a lot of opportunity to drive innovation. Yes, so for me, I highly encourage we used to, in fact, back when I was in engineering in the US, we used to run these graduate recruitment programs to bring prospective students into engineering. Right, and you’re absolutely right. When you went there, start off like what are you interested in?
Carl Solder:
13:45
it was mostly everything but networking yeah but after we gave them their pitch around what we do in the networking space, we’d turn quite a lot of those students around and they’re like, okay, actually this sounds quite interesting and I hadn’t really thought about that. So maybe taking the time to go and understand the space might generate a little bit more interest.
Michael van Rooyen:
14:04
You and I are well aligned there. It’s similar to your digital plumber at heart, and that’s where I started, and I struggle with people trying to get into the space without understanding that fundamental of just plumbing right. And on your point, around the wireless, no one thinks about everything either side of that. I have actually a saying called happy Wi-Fi, happy Li-Fi, because that’s what people want. They actually don’t think about what’s broken on the street, it’s just the Wi-Fi is broken, right, that’s the first thing you hear.
Carl Solder:
14:27
So it’s a fun fact and I think you’re right study, and a lot of that generation would rather lose something else than internet access or connectivity, which is kind of bizarre, isn’t it? It is yeah.
Michael van Rooyen:
14:39
Look as we get closer to the end. Carl, I appreciate your time but, reflecting on your career and you’ve seen lots and lots of change what are some of the most rewarding experiences that you’ve seen and what continues to motivate you in what you do?
Carl Solder:
14:52
There’s a couple of times in my career I think the first time that on the recruitment side, yes, the first set of graduates that we hired, bringing them in pretty green, not really knowing a lot about networking, and looking at where they are now, yes, pretty proud moment. Yes, it’s kind of like almost like a parent moment, where you see these individuals grow, yes, and being able to do c, cisco lives and present and do demos and you think, man, from where they came from to where they are now that for me as a leader, awesome From a technology standpoint.
Carl Solder:
15:24
I’ve been really fortunate to be involved in a lot of what’s happened, Like when I first started. There was no internet, it was mainframes I’m showing my age here, but PCs were just brand new. But I’ve seen the internet come into play. I remember seeing the web browser for the very first time Netscape Navigator and thinking, wow, that’s amazing.
Carl Solder:
15:43
I can remember back in the day when the iPhone came out. From Cisco standpoint, we’ve gone through some evolutions. Through some evolutions. I can remember we built the very first mass scalable data center infrastructure. In the early days when Microsoft, google, amazon were setting and building their data centers, they were hitting scale limits that no one else in the industry was seeing. So I was part of an engineering team that were trying to figure out how to solve for that. I’ve been involved in bringing products to market that have generated billions of dollars for Cisco and I’m super proud of the part that I’ve had to play in bringing those products to market. I’ve been involved in leading some of the developments and a lot of my ideas have actually found themselves in the products that are in use today. And when I walk into a customer and they say I’m using this product, I kind of think in the back of my mind. I think, yeah, I had a part to play in that and that’s also a very proud moment for me.
Carl Solder:
16:39
So there’s a number of different areas that I kind of look back and reflect, but I’m super happy and super lucky that I’ve been able to experience all of that.
Michael van Rooyen:
16:47
Yeah, absolutely, and you’re right. Sometimes I’ve walked into customers, to customers who we’ve done large transformations for, and you don’t think about it because it’s a project or an item you’re doing at the time. Then you go back sometime later and interact with them and you realize, oh, you were involved with that. And to think about the products you’ve been involved in and how many lives and things has changed. The core, fundamental that you used to say was a way to live, learn and play, and if you think about how much you’ve done in that space, it would certainly be reflecting and rewarding. Look, as we wrap up, just two more for you. First of all, as we close up, cisco Live, are there any other? We’ve talked a lot today about a bunch of things, but any key messages that you want to leave with people listening today from the event or just in general?
Carl Solder:
17:29
Yeah, look, I think Cisco Live again. It’s a big event. There’s a lot going on.
Michael van Rooyen:
17:33
And.
Carl Solder:
17:33
I think there’s going to be many sessions that people are not necessarily going to get a chance to go to. So I would encourage people post Cisco Live, maybe to take a look at our Cisco Live On Demand site and just scan through and have a look at some of the other sessions that they didn’t have a chance to go to, because there’s normally some pearls of wisdom that get thrown into some of these other sessions that might help organizations. That’s the first thing, and the other thing too is at least, while people are here, go in the world of solutions and speaking to partners and also going to the various demos to see what the technologies are.
Carl Solder:
18:11
I think that’s really important, and then following up with their sales teams that they engage with to maybe get some personalized demos and see how that might play in their own business.
Michael van Rooyen:
18:23
Last one for you. The question for all attendees of the podcast is whilst you’ve covered a lot, particularly around reflecting on your career, but can you tell me the most significant technology change or shift that you’ve been involved in or seen over your career? Now it doesn’t obviously have to be anything you’ve done, but even fundamentally more of a global level impact.
Carl Solder:
18:42
That’s a really good question. There’s actually quite a few that I can choose from. I think for me it would be when Cisco bought Celsius.
Michael van Rooyen:
18:53
Right.
Carl Solder:
18:54
And Celsius was a voiceover IP telephony company and I remember as a young sales engineer going around with a laptop under my arm and a couple of IP phones in my backpack and going into a customer and plugging these phones into Ethernet ports and saying pick up the call, and then I would switch the Ethernet cable from this port to that port and the call would stay up. My customers are like man, how did you do that? What happened? Yeah, for me I think that’s a very significant one. Yes, that transition from the old pbx style yeah to voice over ip and you think about now.
Carl Solder:
19:28
I mean, everything is ip enabled facetime, all the video conferencing that we do is all ip based. That transition, I think, was massive, agreed, and for me that’s probably one of the biggest ones that sticks in my mind I agree.
Michael van Rooyen:
19:42
Um, I was fortunate enough that the name celsius I’ve heard for a long time, pre-2000. Uh, you know, I was lucky enough to be playing with, you know, as was transitioning from celsius to call manager, you know, in the in the very first version. So I think the Celsus name was still a little bit brown but. I remember seeing that transition and the tedium world stressing out that we’re not going to have jobs, etc. Etc etc. But they’ve all pivoted to become data people right.
Carl Solder:
20:06
And now they’re cyber people.
Michael van Rooyen:
20:07
So that evolution, as always with our technology industry, just continues to evolve.
Carl Solder:
20:11
Yes, jobs will evolve and change and adapt based on the technology at the time.
Michael van Rooyen:
20:16
Yeah, Carl, again really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming to see us at our booth.
Carl Solder:
20:21
I appreciate the opportunity.
Michael van Rooyen:
20:22
Thank you no problem.
Carl Solder:
20:23
Thank you, cheers.
