CS17 Keynote: SVP and General Manager, IoT and Applications, Cisco, Rowan Trollope

Good morning. Everybody hear me at the back? Okay. So I am very, very excited to be here, and I'd first like to just thank our partners at Ingram for having us and giving us this opportunity to talk to you today. We're going to do something a little bit different, if that's okay. We're going to talk about an exciting new opportunity for everyone here in the room. And I'd secondly like to thank all of you. I'd like to see a show of hands. How many of y'all sell Cisco or have sold Cisco at some point in your lives? OK, almost everyone. Cool. You're going to love what we're here to talk about today, because again, it's a golden opportunity for all of you to make more money. So I can remember about 7 years ago, first time I met Renee, when I think I was at a different company, and we were integrating into a previous version of this cloud platform. And it's great to see how far you've come with the technology. Of course, we're here to talk today about a brand new product that we're going to launch on the cloud platform that everyone's going to be able to sell directly on the Ingram Cloud platform. So very, very excited about that. So 3 years ago, as Renee mentioned, I joined Cisco. And I joined Cisco with sort of one overriding goal in mind, and that was to completely reinvent the collaboration technologies and frankly, the collaboration industry. And that was something that Cisco had been trying to do and had been working on for a long time. And I thought that was a terrific opportunity for me to kind of come on board and help out with that. And so today what you're going to see is the fruits of that labor over the last 3 years, really, the work that we did to kind of make that happen. And so let's jump right into it. And I'm going to start out by telling you a little bit of a story. There should be a slide behind me. There we go. How many of you have had a chance to go to San Francisco, maybe have seen the Golden Gate Bridge? Most of you have been to like one of the conferences out there. So some of you might know that the Golden Gate Bridge logo actually inspired, or the Golden Gate Bridge inspired the Cisco logo. Funny story about that. You know, but 100 years ago, before the bridge ever was built, before there was a Golden Gate Bridge, it was known around the world as the bridge that can't be built. And the reason was that it was— it would have had to have been the longest bridge ever built at the time, in the deepest water, under conditions where no one had ever sort of imagined building a bridge. Very, very fast-moving currents and sustained 60-mile-an-hour winds. So everyone basically said, "This bridge can't be built." And of course, you know, I live in San Francisco. Every morning I wake up— I actually don't have a view of the bridge from my house, but I can— We will walk a couple blocks and I can see it. So of course we have a Golden Gate Bridge today, but everyone said years and years ago it was impossible. So we did get it built. Now every industry, and especially in technology, there are these kinds of ideas, these impos— seemingly impossible tasks. And in the collaboration technology space, there is also a seemingly impossible task. And that's what I like to call the 5% barrier. So what is the 5% barrier? Well, despite the success that Cisco and others in this industry have had, you know, building— and all of you, by the way— building billions of dollars worth of business for conferencing technologies, the experience that most people have when they go into a conference room, okay, is pretty dismal, frankly. And I don't know if you've ever experienced that yourself, but your customers certainly have. I know I have. And we've made great inroads into about 5% of the conference rooms with kind of modern technology. And what's in the other 95% of the rooms, which is, by the way, about 40 million rooms globally, is a bunch of kind of junk, essentially, like old equipment that's not very good. And it's not a good experience for customers. And so that's been kind of the holy grail for us, because no matter how great the products Cisco produced were, we never could seem to get to get beyond that 5%. We can never seem to sell them everywhere. And that's what we wanted to do, because 19 out of 20 people are having a bad experience when they go into these conference rooms. I mean, they're not having a great experience when they're using old legacy technologies. Most of the rooms in the world, most of the conference rooms and conferencing equipment, it's like they're stuck in a time machine. And it's like turning back the clock by 10 years when you go in there. And it's an awful, awful experience. So that's sort of been the holy grail in the collaboration space, is to get technologies into all the rest of the spaces and all the rest of the places where people meet. How could we do that? And that's what we've sort of set about to do. And no one's been able to break through this barrier, and that sort of is the impossible task we set out to go after. So let me show you kind of what I mean. In fact, I brought an example of that technology just to kind of bring it to life a little bit. So you can see right here, I have it in this case. Here we go. And walk it over here, and I'll open it up so you can all see kind of the stuff that I'm talking about, essentially. OK, they've got it all. I asked to bring it on a wheelbarrow, and they said no. So in here, you're going to have essentially the vast majority of the kind of stuff that you would find in a typical conference room. Projectors is a good example. Anybody seen one of these before? A rat's nest of cables, you know, dongles, remote controls, all kinds of crazy stuff basically in these rooms. You've all seen that. And that's sort of like, if I could sum up the experience of all of this legacy technology, I could sum it up in one word: pain. It's very painful to try to use this technology. It wasn't designed to work together. It doesn't deliver an incredible experience, and that's what we want to change. So I'm going to show you how we're doing that. Where's my clicker? It's over here somewhere. There it is. All right. So that's what we want to fix. And if I can go to the next slide, I want to share with you, at the risk of sort of oversimplifying this picture, here's what it looks like to me. There we go. On the horizontal axis, you have ease of use. OK, not very easy to use on the left, easy to use on the right. And the vertical represents the completeness of the solution. So the stuff that you see here is really on the upper left. It's a bunch of disparate technologies that don't really work very well and aren't very easy to use. You have to kind of put a bunch of stuff together to kind of get it to work. And then there's video conference— video conferencing technologies and kind of modern technology, and that stuff is clearly on the lower right. It doesn't do everything you need, but it's pretty easy to use if you get the latest stuff. What we wanted to do is get something in the upper right. Easy to use and does everything that you want, and that's what we need. We need a product that does everything you need and is incredibly easy to use. To repeat myself, that's what we're doing. And really with no compromises. Of course, we have to do that and make it affordable. Now, that product really hasn't existed until today, until recently. In fact, in January, we launched this product, and as of May 5th, this product, along with the cloud subscription that goes along with it, will be available on the Ingram Cloud platform. So, we're really, really excited about that. And the product is what we call Sparkboard. And you can see it sitting here. It's been quietly dark for the morning, and now we've lit it up, and you can see it's sort of waiting to be used. This is Sparkboard. So we announced this in January in San Francisco, and it's really a revolutionary product. It's 3 products in 1. It's not one thing. First, it's a breakthrough wireless presentation device. Second, it's a beautiful digital whiteboard. And third, it's a next-generation conferencing device. So it's 3 things in 1, and we designed it from the ground up to go into every single meeting room in the world. So if you've got a customer that has a conference room, this product is perfect for them, and I'm going to share that with you. So I think we should just dive in and actually do a demo. Now everybody knows that Cisco makes the best video conferencing technology in the world. I mean, Cisco's the gold standard by which all other companies are judged in this category. The first thing you need to know about Sparkboard is it's not a video conferencing device, okay? It's not a video conferencing device first. It's a wireless presentation display, it's a digital whiteboard, it's really an all-in-one meeting room product, and that's what Sparkboard is. And it's incredibly easy to use. So let's start by talking about the design. What you're gonna notice is that everything about this is really designed to be easy to use. It's, in fact, here we go, it's a 4K display, this is a 70-inch model, it's a 4K display, it's 49mm thick, and it's absolutely beautiful. It looks like a giant tablet, and that's very intentional. We've designed Sparkboard so that it looks easy to use, it looks like something familiar. There's always a tendency when you design something new to make something that is not familiar that is new, This is designed to look like something you've seen before, like an iPad or an Android tablet. Very, very, very easy. And there's absolutely no learning curve required to use Spark Board. So I want to talk to you about the specs. Packed inside here, despite the fact that it's not a video conferencing device, it also has a 4K camera along with 12 microphones, OK? And those are in an array so that we can do without a— microphone on the table. So those are some of the things that are packed inside, as well as two NVIDIA Jetson CPUs. So it's a really incredibly powerful device. And of course, the entire Surface is what's called a PCAP display, a capacitive multi-touch display just like your iPhone or tablet. It's incredibly responsive, and you can use your fingers to control it. So now, just as important as what you see with this device— and of course, it's really beautiful, we like the design, you can get some good shots of it— Just as important as what you see is what you don't see. What you don't see is a whole mess of cables, because we had one simple design criteria for Spark Board: no cables. In fact, we were able to ship only requiring one cable, and that's the power cable. And if we could have done a deal with Elon Musk to ship a giant battery, we would have done that, but we didn't do it. So we have to require a power cable, but other than that, there are absolutely no cables. That means there's no cable to the table for a microphone. There are no cables to the table for a, for a display, no HDMI cable or anything like that. There's no cable for a remote control. Everything is here, and finally, there's no infrastructure. We're here at the cloud conference. All of the infrastructure for Sparkboard is powered by the cloud. It's all hosted in the cloud. It's a fully modern multi-tenant infrastructure that's called Cisco Spark. It's owned and operated by Cisco. And there are some incredible partner benefits to the way that we've actually structured that. So we can, we can do that in a variety of different ways. But fundamentally, you turn it on and in minutes you've got it up and running. So this device is connected to the internet here. We're actually going to dive in. So I'm going to now kind of jump in here. The beauty of this device isn't skin deep. We've completely changed and written a brand new interface for this. We've started from scratch with a brand new interface. Had to be extraordinarily intuitive. And that's what you see here. So I'm going to take you through and show you some of the capabilities. The first thing I want to show you is wireless presentation display. So if I can get my laptop up on screen here— OK, there we go. And just to prove this, hopefully that— nope, OK, they don't want me to unplug it. All right, no problem. Don't unplug the laptop, they said. OK, so we get the laptop back on screen. There it is. So you've all been in that scenario where you walk into the room and you got to hunt around for the cable, maybe you don't have the right dongle, and so forth and so on. Well, we invented an entirely new wireless screen sharing technology, and all you have to do is open our app, Cisco Spark, which you can download for free, tap one button, and if you are within proximity, so within nearby range of a Spark board, you can wirelessly present your content there. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that there. When I tap on this button, what you'll see here is you see this is the Spark app, and right here, and you can see it's automatically detected the Ingram Micro SparkBoard. So it's not using Bluetooth, it's not using Wi-Fi, it's using a completely proprietary wireless technology that we invented for this. And we can just tap one button. When I do that, if everything works, this device is going to send its screen to the cloud, and then SparkBoard is going to magically pull that screen down. You're going to see it over there. Let's go ahead and do it. It's incredibly reliable. It always works, especially in demos. And there we go. Uh, we got the screen share going. Yes, so step 1. Okay, so that's great, and it's really, really easy. People are using this, and they love this feature, because it is nothing more frustrating than you just can't get your content on the screen. It's designed with no cables in mind, so perfect. Now, we wanted to go one step further. What if you come into the room, Turns out presenting from your laptop often has a lot of challenges about it. You get like a notification from your significant other in the middle of a presentation, maybe your antivirus updates need to, yeah, maybe your AV needs to update, you know, something's going on on your computer all the time, it's not a great way to present. And so we wanted to kind of fundamentally reinvent that, and because Sparkboard is natively connected to the cloud, and it's connected to Spark, which is through Spark connected to Box, Dropbox, whatever cloud storage you happen to have, we can automatically pull your content down right to the device. And it's a way better way to present. So let me show you that now. I'm going to close the laptop. We'll lose that screen. Good. We should stop— we should see it shut down here. We'll stop the share. And what I now want to do is I'm going to show you I can just pull the content up on my iPhone, and I can pull it right up on the board. So I'm gonna do that. So, if I can get my iPhone on screen, there it is. So this is the Spark app, I'm gonna open the Spark app right here, and I'm gonna take our space, and I'm gonna open the space. This is a meeting that we have scheduled for this particular demo, so we're now in the meeting, okay? And all I have to do is go over to my Spark board, and tap, and you can see all the files that we've created for that given meeting. And I'm sure you've all, this is a great way to present, right? I mean, you can pull it up, you can tap, you can zoom in and out, You can scroll around. It's a really nice way to present and use the technology. Now, one thing that you probably all— like, this is a much better way to present than I think we've done before. You've probably all been in a meeting where you've said, "Well, I'm sorry that I put up this eye chart right here, uh, and nobody can see the details." Well, now you can just nice and easy zoom right in and get into the details, okay? So that's a great way to present. People love presenting on Sparkboard. It's totally changing the way that people are meeting. So that's wireless presentation sharing, step 1. All right, now I want to show you the next capability, which is whiteboarding. Now you've all seen SMART Boards, those old SMART Board category, those old SMART Board products, they're usually sitting in the corner of the room gathering dust, or there's like one person that's completely obsessed with it and uses it all the time, but nobody else can figure it out. That is the state of the SMART Board category. We didn't want to do anything like that. We wanted to make an incredible incredibly easy-to-use product that anyone could walk up and use. And so we did that. Literally, all you have to do is walk up, tap once, and you can be whiteboarding. So here we've already created a whiteboard for this demo. I'm gonna go create a new one. Do a little Golden Gate Bridge. There we go. You can see you can do multitouch. It's super cool. Um, and it's very, very nice, very, very easy. Of course, what's even better about this— you've all probably been there— When you're in a whiteboard session and you need to leave and restart, what do you do to save your whiteboard? You do this. Do not erase. That's easy. Of course, then 3 months later, someone comes in and goes, "I think I saw that 3 months ago," and no one can use the whiteboard anymore because you've claimed it. Well, you don't have to do that anymore with Sparkboard. In fact, every whiteboard is automatically saved all the time to the cloud in a secure and encrypted way. And they're always live. So for example, I can tap right on my phone here and jump right into that session, and you'll see anyone, by the way, who's in the meeting can see that, whether they're local or remote, anywhere in the world. You can see there's my whiteboard, and I can draw on it, and it's live. You see that? We can do it back and forth, and you can do it. It's great for an iPad. It's great for anything else. So We can make this little thing a thing of the past. There we go. Gone. Very nice. All right, so that is whiteboarding. Now, of course, I'm giving you a flash tour of this product. We're just running through a whole bunch of features. What demonstration from Cisco would be complete without a phone call? I think that's probably the next thing we should do. So let me jump now into showing you how we bring all of these together. Because we tightly control end-to-end the cloud service, The software on the device, which gets pushed every day, we push updates and, you know, new features to the product, just like a Tesla or any other device that's connected to the cloud. We keep this up to date all the time, and we always make sure that it's a great experience. And we tie all of those things together. We guarantee that the whiteboarding and the conferencing and the file sharing and everything's all going to work seamlessly. So let me show you how that works. I'm going to go ahead and make a call. And we're gonna call into our team here. So I can either go up to the device, or if I'm sitting at my conference table, I can just tap right on here. I can tap the call button. And you'll see that it sees that we're near this device, so we can hit call. And if everything works, we should get the team to join this meeting, and then you can say hello to them. There we go, someone's joining. Hello. Hey, Ali, how are you? Good, how you doing? I'm good, thank you. Say hello to Phoenix and everybody here at Ingram Cloud Summit. Hi guys. Say hi, say hi, don't be shy. She doesn't bite. Hey Ali, so I guess where are you right now? Currently in San Francisco. Okay, you're in San Francisco and you're standing in front of a Spark board, is that right? Yep. Okay, so you can see the image is coming from her device. Now by the way, all of this is going over the public internet. There's no private MPLS connections. There's no Cisco mumbo jumbo or other things that we've done to make a fake experience. This is real and legit. You can have this experience too. Ali, just to prove it, I think we should go and we should maybe do a little shared whiteboard. So I'm going to jump back to the whiteboard. OK? And I think I was in the midst of creating a beautiful demonstration— OK, that's not so good— of the Golden Gate Bridge. I'm going to share this with Ali. To do that, I just tap Share Live so she can see my extremely bad version of the Golden Gate Bridge. Of course, you can see my phone also got that notification. So Ali, pick a different color and draw something just so we can prove that this is working. Ooh, I like your drawing, Rowan. Yeah, thanks. My drawing skills are not the best. Let's see if yours are any better. There she goes. She's making it red. That's the real color. All right, there we go. I don't know if everyone can see that. Maybe not. Give me a smiley face over on the left. There we go. Boop, boop, boop. So there we go. Oh, thank you, Ali. Hey, so that was awesome. Thank you very much. Everyone, thanks a lot. Team, say goodbye to Ali. Ali, thanks. I'll let you get back to work. Bye, guys. Bye-bye. One tap, end the call. Now everything we just did, of course, is pinned in Spark in the cloud, so it's a completely new way to work. Spark, in addition, is a whole new way to work. In addition to everything that you've just seen, everything we did, you can do in pure software from an iPhone, from an iPad, from an Android phone, from any mobile device, any tablet, and from any laptop. And we have all of that, and it's freely available for download on the App Store, okay? So you can get that technology from us, ciscospark.com. You can also sell it to your customers now directly through the Ingram Cloud Marketplace. So very, very exciting. It's the first thing that we're launching there, and it's really, really seamless and really easy. So thank you guys for making that available. So that's a demonstration of Sparkboard. You're going to get to see a lot more of that. We'll have a breakout where you can talk to our team and actually see more about Sparkboard. The next thing I wanted to talk about is back to my 95/5. So that problem of 5% of the conference rooms, A big part of that is affordability. So we wanted to make a product that totally broke all the rules. And here's the price. For the 55-inch version, the MSRP is $4,990 and $199 a month cloud subscription. So that's a recurring revenue subscription that you get a rev share on. So you bill your customer, you pay us back, uh, the component that we charge, which is much less than that. That. So there's a lot of money to be made here. And by the way, if you add up $199 a month times 12 times, you know, 3 to 5 years plus that price, it's still way, way, way less expensive than what customers are used to paying for the crappy experience that they typically tend to get today. So it's a really revolutionary new product. The product I demonstrated today, the 70-inch, $9,990 upfront for the hardware and $199 per month. How many of you sell Meraki? Okay, this is like essentially Meraki for collaboration. It's completely cloud-powered. It includes a recurring revenue subscription. Every room you sell is building up a huge recurring revenue base for your business, and the numbers add up very, very quickly. In addition to that, you can sell Spark user licenses, and we've created a great new way to buy that called Spark Flex. In fact, we've had many double-digit million deal— dollar deals come in. They're really starting to roll in. SparkFlex essentially lets you buy everything from Cisco with one simple license. So that's the Spark Board. That's the price. We're really, really excited about it. We're excited to see what you can do with it. They're flying off the shelves at the moment, and the team has also created a great offer for all of you. We are going to give you all of the subscriptions that you need for Spark and Sparkboard for up to 250 users for free, which in case of 250 users is $138,000 value that Cisco is going to provide to all of the Ingram partners for free. So you can find out more about that. Thank you. We're really excited about where— about what we can do with this. We think that the opportunity here is for, for, for the industry is around $20 billion of market cap for a product that could solve this problem. We think we've done it. We'd like you to be the judge. Come to our breakout, order one, come to one of our sessions, come to one of our EBCs, take a look at the technology, and let us know if you can make a great business with it. So with that, I'd just like to thank everyone here. Thank you, Renee. Thank you, team. Appreciate the time this morning. Thank you.