Papi Menon, Cisco | RSA Conference 2023

This is texturung TV. Hi everyone. We're back after lunch here.

We're in the final home stretch of our RSA coverage this year. What a great RSA. It's been if you haven't been able to tune in or you have tuned in.

We hope you've enjoyed it. If you haven't all of our interviews and coverage here at RSA we'll be available on textrung TV on demand and also, our devsic Ops event which was devops connect SecOps took place Monday here at Moscone Center all of our sessions for that are available on SecOps or devops connective SEC Ops virtual. Taking place on June 1st.

com native now or digital cxl and you can register from there my next Is Happy Menon? That's correct. I did it.

All right. Yeah, it's hard for me to remember a name more than 30 seconds after I heard it. So it's a good thing.

Welcome. Welcome to Tech strong TV. How are you?

I'm doing very well. Like you said it's been an amazing conference. The buzz has been great.

It's great to see people in person and walk the floor and see all the interesting ideas that are coming to fruition. So it's been great. You know what it's it's good to be back.

Yeah, it is back, but Papi We should start with. Where I know you're with Cisco right papi works with Cisco, but don't tell our audience share. If you don't mind a little bit of you know, what your current position is.

It's going maybe a little bit about your history as well your own story sure. I'm happy to do that. So I lead a product management and go to market for the emerging Technologies and incubation group at Cisco.

And the charter of the group really is to discover and validate and actually build out transformational business opportunities for Cisco. And as you can imagine that's a pretty broad Charter. So looking at a variety of different Technologies and trends that are out there and seeing if there's anything there that can lead to a really transformational business opportunity for for Cisco, right?

And that's as you can imagine. That's a pretty big ass because As you all know. A startup most startups fail.

So just having a successful business incubated is is you know, it's tough enough and then when you say that it has to be something meaningful. Let's just go scale. Now you're talking about an entirely different which is one of the most successful businesses of all time right now, you're talking about an entirely different scale of challenge, but it's an interesting opportunity.

It's also very You know, it's an exciting one, you know, it's just cool brings a lot of unique strengths to the table. So it's about finding those inflection points where we can bring that leverage to bear and and discover those opportunities. So that's what I do at Cisco.

But I've been at Cisco for about three months so fairly new at Cisco. I was prior to Cisco at hashicor building out the cloud platform for a number of years prior to that. I had a short stinted Docker prior to that at GitHub for a few years.

So I've been in this space. Yeah devops infrastructure. Yeah all of this.

Yeah, great. So I was sweet spot, right? That's perfect.

So I'm gonna we're gonna take a little bit of a different path than one would expect at an RSA conference. I'm gonna go back to net last week where I was in Amsterdam at kubecon. And you know Cisco obviously had a presence there but your group specifically had a big presence there because you do play a lot in the open source Cloud native spacing, you know, and it's your it's your background too right doctor and and all of GitHub Etc.

Why don't we start there? Let's talk about some of the open source Cloud native. Whether it's observability, you know.

Or infrastructure, you know in this new kind of Stack if you will. Stuff that you you have going on not yet used specifically that the group has going on. Yeah, I'd love to talk about that.

This is this is an area that's very close to my heart from my previous places. I've worked at all. So generally as one of the secular trends that we are seeing in the industry if you look at The you know, we've talked about developers of the new king makers.

You know, this is this is kind of an established Trend right now where the center of gravity for the industry is shifting from the top down decision making kind of mode into more of a bottom-up practitioner-driven Community Driven awareness and Adoption of even enterprise-grade products. So this is super important and it's come about because you know of the nature of the cloud application lifecycle, you know, these are there is a wide variety of tools and Technologies out there developers tend to go out and find the things that work the best for them and companies have realized that you can't stem the tide. You know, you have to help accelerate that Journey you have to help developers be more.

Be more productive and use the tools that they're comfortable with and and then adopt them into the Enterprise so, you know open source and that whole community and has played a large part in that. So when you look at Technologies like GitHub, then you look at technology docker. Have played a huge transformational role kubernetes, you know, I mean, these are these are technologies that have really played a role in in this in this wave of transforming the devops landscape or the infrastructure landscape.

So we have seen that and we also are you know, we we're building a number of different products that are open source, you know. Tools and the community starting to realize that so we had a big Presence at kubecon and we got a lot of interest in the offerings that we have. So we have a bunch of observability tools that we're building.

You know, we have a tool Clarity VM Clarity a bunch of API Clarity. So there are observability tools that we build and the security product and Optica. For example, the one that we've We've been showing at RSA.

Our built on those tools. So so this is a this is a well tested fap for Enterprise security tools and we are also building on that. It's not just Enterprise security tools.

I think it's a well-tested path for tools in general, correct? And and as far as the Enterprise, you know that what used to be one of the things well get open source scale Enterprise level. It's fine for an experiment or in a lab, but You know, I think.

Certainly, if you go to cube corner you go see what kind of you know, you're talking about or some of the companies you've worked with in the past. So Dad about it, right? Of course, it's an Enterprise class thing as America 90.

I think it's 98% of all Enterprises have oh use open source. What's interesting is what a difference that I mean. I've been here in the industry for a long time.

What a difference that is from 25 30 years ago. Where? You know open source was well, we don't know who's gonna support it.

We don't know who's going to train us. There's no, you know, there's no one to point a finger at and does it really work. It is a different world even in security where?

Doubting Thomas is a lot right? I think it's it's reached that level of acceptance. I guess my question to you though Papi is I mean it's one thing to go out and find open sources one thing and go out and find some new technologies.

It's got to be a terrible burden to go out and find something that's gonna be Cisco's scale, right? So, how does you know what? People out here think that that might be something I'm like them to know about what we're doing at our startup or an hour kind of in our lab.

What do you look for that really gives you that kind of scalability? That's a really good question. And that's the whole job isn't it?

I mean that it's hard to tell. The one thing that we we look at for example, and when I said I chose my words carefully there right? So when I said it's a transformational business opportunity for Cisco, right Cisco, obviously, like I said, one of the most successful businesses ever, you know, so it's it's not that when you're looking at a technology in the early stages of its of its life.

You cannot be looking at it purely from a very, you know, you can't be too prescriptive about it. You know, you can't look at it just from Revenue or Enterprise adoption or the potential there? Right?

Do you have to look at it in a much more holistic way water does is attract new personas that we are not talking to right now. Does this does open up new routes to market for us, you know does this tap into you know net new? You know opportunities out there while bringing our strengths to Bear right?

We have to look at things where we have we're bringing some unfair advantages to the table, right? You know as a product manager, I'm not interested in. Well, I am interested in that as well.

But like the things that really get me excited or not just incremental advances, right? It's disruptive advances where you're bringing some really you're bringing a really large lever to move the world, right and then and think about Cisco. I mean Cisco brings, you know, the mother of all levels, you know, think about that business right now.

You're really looking for those pivot Points where you can put that level to Bear right? And so those come in a variety of different ways. And you have to be open to that.

And it's a messy process right? I keep telling the folks that I work with, you know Innovation is a messy process. It's messy it's imprecise.

You can't be formulaic about in Innovation, right? That's the nature of the Beast. That does not mean that does not absolve us of the need for strategic rigor in how we pursue those opportunities.

So that that's really the whole game, you know, really find walk that balance, you know corralling that imprecision embracing it but at the same time bringing a level of strategic thinking to that process say this is the Seas you speak to pe's you speak to other organizations that have sort of innovation programs. Strategic Adele Dell Technologies are great example of Intel right? They all have they all do it.

Everyone really takes. Yeah. Yeah the problem and I've I've always spent most of my career on the other side of that coin, right?

That's the entrepreneur. within idea starting something and you know the worst thing not the worst thing but you go in and you meet with people and they say well you know, this isn't the this isn't the Unicorn. Kind of project we're looking for we want a 10x or we want to you know, we want to get a big return on an investment.

We want something that is gonna Cisco scale we want here. It's yeah sometimes. Every entrepreneur and I've been in startups on it every entrepreneur I've ever met.

Who's been successful in their startup? Did not believe or did believe rather in some way. What they were doing is going to change the world.

It may not be earth-shattering changes. But in some way it's going to change the world make things better. But I it's it's very hard to say.

Okay, is that change gonna be truly? You know Cisco scale word chain world changing or Okay, you know three people are gonna be happy about this. It's a hard thing and I I just get afraid sometimes that a lot of babies get thrown out with the bathwater and this is a very I I think you're you're spot on.

It's it's a risk for sure. Right and you're right. This is not a unique problem.

Right every company at scale grapples with this right if the classic innovators dilemma everyone grapples with them at some point if you're successful enough, right? It's a good problem to have but the problem you have to have a certain level of success even to even have that threshold, right? All right with you and so we know we're not the only ones our goal is to be better than most you know at this and there is a You're right.

I mean there is a it's a fine line. You have to give things the time to mature and sometimes you know markets take time to to products take time to find their right footing in the market. You can be too early.

You can be too late. You know, you have to you know, just time it just right. That said I think you know more than if you're thinking about in general incubator, you mentioned we see so looking for a 10x.

It were done on investment. You know, that's that's the game they play right? We don't play that game.

And so when I talked earlier about What are the unique and advantages that we bring to the table? What are the unfair advantages that we have? And how do we bring those to bear on this problem or this opportunity that we have?

That's one of them. Right? Like we are not constrained by that.

We are not constrained by that. perhaps short-term thinking of like I need this to be a 10 exit right? We can play the long game in certain cases.

So that's one of the things that we bring to bear great agreed. Let's turn specifically to RSA. Sure.

So you mentioned there's a one of your with I know it was with a p and I apologize an optical let's talk about it panoptico. Is it up an Optica? It ends with an a panoptica.

That's right your group or Cisco in general. This is specifically from the Etna incubation group. Let's hear about it.

Yeah, it's open Optical is our so before I get into an optical. Let me take since we've been talking about etni. Let's look at the the broad framework of what we do and then I can get into that.

Okay, so As I mentioned we are looking for transformational business opportunities for Cisco and that is a very big canvas to look at right but there are specific areas that we've that we are looking at within that there's there's Cloud native all of the things around there, you know, if Cloud native application life cycle. Securing it connecting it managing it Etc. Right.

So that's the space. We look at we look at Edge native and then there are other things we look at like Ai and more emerging Technologies. So within the cloud native security space fan opticals are offering that Looks at the end to end life cycle of a modern Cloud native application.

And secures that entirety the the entire end to end life cycle all the way from code through deploy through man management and connectivity through apis. That entire life cycle securing that that's our Solution that's been Optical. I love it.

What kind of feedback what have you seen on the show floor from people around it? The feedback has been very positive. Um and the shop, you know, the the Expo floor has been an interesting place.

So I was just walking around obviously looking at competitors what they're doing looking at new startups, you know, just looking at the smaller boots a lot. Yeah, very good. Not the core.

You got to do the periphery. That's where the action that's where the action is. That's exactly right.

So I was wondering around the Perry free looking at what what people are doing it. There's a lot of interesting ideas out there. The overwhelming feeling you get is the attack surface is expanding so much, you know, the the cloud native space the tools the technologies that are at Play.

Are just so mind-bogglingly diverse. There are just a huge number of ways that you can come under under attack. and so startups, especially at the periphery like you mentioned they are starting in various based on their skills their expertise the the unique perspective they bring They find an insertion point in that right whether it is supply chain security or API security or workload security somewhere in there.

They go in there and they find a good product right and they try to outdo their their peers in that space. But very soon they start to find that that's not enough, you know, because the the whole thing with security is you need to have the appropriate context. It's not enough to say that a particular container or a particular workload or a VM or you know, or a function is insecure.

For some reason you have to tie to the broader business context. You know, why does that matter to me? Like how?

Why is this important? Yeah, you told me that that thing is insecure. Why should I care?

You know, so tying it into that business application Level context dying it into that developer level context, right? So we we say context is critical, you know. Otherwise you just inundated with a lot of information that you can't really take action on.

So that's really what fan Optical is all about. It's about providing you that end-to-end contextual. You know richness of information that will allow you to prioritize the threats that really matter, you know of these thousand alerts that you're telling me about.

Which one should I pay attention to? Right? That's what it's all about.

Absolutely and quite frankly the desensitation and the Avalanche of information. Yeah, it's the it's the dark underbelly of. A big data, right we because you could collect it doesn't mean the necessarily need to anyway.

Hey, we are we're way overtime. I apologize, but our next guest is waiting and we're gonna bring her on here in a second. com is a big place.

com or panoptica dot app and that will tell them everything. They need to know about the group and the product for the security product that we're building and there's more information there, please there is a free trial that they can try out. com and that's more for the whole, you know, Technology Group innovation group and then panoptica.

Spelled that for us p a n o p t i c a DOT app dot app. Yeah. Okay check that one out.

com by the way, uh-huh. That's important. Hey, if you listen to me, I apologize.

It's it so you get for listening to me Cisco Dash ETA don t i, excuse me calm. All right, we're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.