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How Intent-Based Networking is Driving Change with Cisco’s Jeff Scheaffer – Futurum Tech Podcast Interview Series

On this episode of the Futurum Tech Podcast – Interview Series I am joined by Jeff Scheaffer, VP of Product Management and Strategy at Cisco. Jeff leads the group focused on networking across data centers, campuses, branches, and the wide area connections — a hot topic right now given the current global situation. Digitization of the network is really the underpinning of a lot that is going on in the changing business world. Developing this foundation for your organization has never been more important.

Our conversation covered several aspects of network transformation, AI in the network, and intent-based networking. Jeff also shared an executive’s perspective on what is really going on in the enterprise. It was a fascinating conversation and one you don’t want to miss.

Intent-Based Networking is Driving Change

My conversation with Jeff also revolved around the following:

  • How businesses and people shifted in 2020 and the various pieces of infrastructure that made it all possible.
  • The transition to digitizing the network in order to improve the application experience driven by the concept of intent-based networking.
  • The security challenges companies must overcome moving to a zero-trust environment.
  • Ways Cisco is taking intent-based networking to the next level in the coming years including how they are leveraging the automation of the digital environment.
  • The benefits for organizations who are able to turn to automation to manage their network environments.
  • How Cisco plans to drive value and innovation for customers in the future.

In my opinion, the intent-based networking and the changes that Jeff talked about will be a key component to driving digital transformation in the future. If you are part of maintaining the network for your organization then this episode is one that needs to be on your ‘must listen’ list.

Listen to my interview with Jeff on your favorite streaming platform here:

Disclaimer: The Futurum Tech Podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this podcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.

Read more analysis from Futurum Research:

Cisco Outperforms In Q1, Predicting An Even Better Q2 

Cisco’s New Edge WAN Platform Flexibly Provides Cloud Assurances To Organizations 

Cisco Silicon One Becomes One Essential Value Proposition For CSPs And Web Scale Data Centers

Image Credit: AiThority

Transcript:

Daniel Newman: Welcome to the Futurum Tech Podcast. I’m your host today, Daniel Newman, Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research.

Very excited about this interview series of the Futurum Tech Podcast, where I’m going to be joined today by Jeff Scheaffer of Cisco. Jeff will be coming on to talk to me about all kinds of things that are going on with network transformation, with AI, with intent-based networking, and just, of course, getting executive perspectives on what’s going on with enterprise, with networking, with the companies that someone like he at Cisco is working with.

Very excited for this show. Very excited to have you here. Of course, before I get started with the show, I always have to say this episode and this show is for information entertainment purposes only. So while we are talking with executives of publicly traded companies, do not take anything we say during the show as investment advice.

Without further ado, Jeff Scheaffer, welcome to the show.

Jeff Scheaffer: Good afternoon, Dan. I’m excited to be here and thanks for spending time late on a Friday to bring us together today.

Daniel Newman: Oh, absolutely. I like that you mention that. People will be listening to this show from the time we release it for years to come. This is a Friday afternoon, so if you sense a little additional enthusiasm, that might be why. We all know the weekend is coming. It is November 2020, so the weekends aren’t quite what they were in 2019, and every year of my life before that, but they’re still better than a workday.

What do they say? Any day fishing is better than a workday. Just kidding. We love what we do.

Jeff, I sense you love what you do. I love what I do. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Why don’t we go ahead, though, and get a little introduction. I’ve teased it, but you’ve got quite a history. I read your profile, but I don’t even know how to do it quickly, so I hope you do.

Jeff Scheaffer: Excellent. Hey, so Dan, I’m really excited to be here. Just a little bit about myself. We have a kind of core purpose and mission in life here at Cisco Systems. It’s really about transforming the way we connect people and places in the world. I’m really excited to be part of that, and I’ve always kind of spent the last 20 years really focused on the innovation and bringing that connection across the globe together.

I’m currently serving at Cisco Systems, as you know, in the role of Vice President for Product and Strategy around our automation assurance analytics software-defined LAN portfolio. That’s really at the core of the Cisco franchise, where we focus on kind of the networking across data centers, campus, branch, and the wide area connections. Never has it been more kind of an important sort of foundation as the digitalization of the network is really underpinning a lot of the economy today, especially given COVID-19 and how the world is changing around us.

So excited to be here, excited to be doing these things.

Daniel Newman: Oh, absolutely. I can sense the enthusiasm. You’ve teed up a few things. I’ve got a few questions for you about the work you’re doing, and I’m going to ask you those in a moment. But just curious, how’s 2020 shaping up? I mean, it’s been a really big year. It’s been a crazy year. It’s shifted a lot about the way we work. Just kind of how are you feeling? How are your interactions? How are you hanging in there? What are you sort of feeling and seeing more broadly before we dive into the work you’re doing?

Jeff Scheaffer: Yeah. So Daniel, I’ll tell you, it’s kind of playing out in so many different levels to the extent that we’re all learning as we go. So if there was ever a period or kind of an era in time where it’s kind of bringing back and renewing that whole curiosity about the world and accelerating the learning in so many dimensions, it’s certainly now. I think there’s more epidemiologists in the world than there ever has been before, at least those of us who play it on TV.

No, in real senses, I think like most others, the personal journey is one aspect of it as we move from the corporate offices to the home office. So how do people kind of work with the working from home? Then there’s also everything that’s going on in the business world and how the business world is responding to the change in how do they serve the needs of their customers and their employee bases. It’s just a really exciting time to kind of learn new things.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it really is. It’s been a boon year, I mean, for what you do in SD-LAN. I mean, like I said, the VPNs got clogged up really quick, and having the technology to help scale that, and we’re going to talk more about that in a minute, the WebEx side of the Cisco business, which by the way, we’re recording on right now, had explosive growth.

I had the benefit of working with that team as well and just watching how Collaboration has evolved. I still remember, and Jeff, I was in Collab and around Collab UC for the last two decades, almost, and we had endlessly talked about everything that could and can be done with video. But really while there’s very few good things to come out of a pandemic, if there was one thing, realizing how much we can get done with technology and video has been one of those great discoveries, because we never really did use video the way we found that we can when we had to.

Jeff Scheaffer: Yeah, absolutely. I can tell you, with respect to our team and our organization, is we’ve responded to kind of the COVID crisis and the need to transform the way we work and primarily moving to a work from home environment.

It’s been really interesting to see how that has worked out as a process. It looks a little bit like a Hype Curve, so to speak. When people first started coming home, they’re like, “Oh my goodness, how do I do this?” Then they started kind of sorting that out. Then suddenly people were like, “Hey, this is fantastic. Look how much more productive I am. It covered the time of the commutes that became productive.” Then you started seeing the downside of the work from home, the hours of the workday extended, working on the weekends started becoming more kind of a challenge.

I know myself, I used to take visual cues. I’m sure this is probably common for a lot of your listeners here, Daniel. When you came home, you’d see the neighbors have the garbage cans outside, it was like a cue to put out the trash. I actually missed the trash cans like three times in the last nine months just because I didn’t have a visual cue.

So you started to change. You started getting the downside of working from home. Now I think we’re to the point where we’re finding that we’ve evolved the tooling, we’ve evolved the practices, we’ve adapted our kind of daily routines, and we’re finding a way to be very successful and productive in this environment.

That has then kind of led to this other sort of realization about what is critical from working from home. It’s interesting to see kind of the ecosystem of things that are coming together to really enable this, whether it’s the evolution of the collaboration technologies and the video conferencing and the applications and the end points or the underpinning infrastructure and the ability to digitize those networks and deliver the application experience and the trust in order to support that work from home environment, and just a tremendous wave of innovation has been driven in response to the changes this year.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. I have one of those Cisco Desk Pros in my office, and that next level of video to get me face-to-face has been great. I mean, there’s some fatigue. I miss people. I miss the queue. I want events back. But I’ve really enjoyed the fact that technology has kept us connected as much as it has.

All right. So I want to talk a little bit about your business, though, because there’s a lot going on. I teased the fact that the SD-LAN and that’s been explosive as well. Everybody talks about the video boom, but the real boom has been on infrastructure side as well.

So let’s talk. We’ve kind of mentioned 2020 has been an anomaly. There’s been massive shifts in how people work. We covered this. But what about the enterprise network? Okay, so how has that changed?

Jeff Scheaffer: Yeah. So just in general, for the enterprise network, infrastructure teams are responding to kind of the changing patterns of usage, and it’s coming in a couple of different ways. So number one, there’s a very strong transition towards digitizing the network. So in the same way that we’ve virtualized other infrastructure, there’s also the virtualization or the digitization of the network itself. Generally people will think of that as like software-defined, or in our case, we take that a step further with intent-based networking.

The goal of that is to improve how do we deliver the application experience? How do we deliver trust and address new threat vectors? How do we deliver and support the new usage model? So as users move from the corporate office, to the branch, to the Starbucks, now to the home office, how do you follow the user? As applications move from data centers into the cloud, how do you follow the application and make sure that you still are able to support which users are able to access which services in the environment and to do that cost effectively and ensure the experience and the trust with that environment? So that then has been driven by this whole concept of intent-based networking, and software-defined LAN is just one part of that. That’s kind of a big part of the innovation that we’re driving today.

Even in our discussion so far, it’s also about reacting to the changes in the environment. So if you look at what’s driving the changes, so we talk about the changing usage patterns, the second thing is kind of the changing environments themselves.

So there’s an evolution in the applications as they move to, for example, 8K video, which is, by the way, 7.29 terabytes per hour in content, or 80 megabits for full-frame, full-motion video, as, I keep thinking, with your 8K display. In addition to that, you think about things like virtual or augmented reality, and it’s low-latency, like 30 milliseconds, in order to support Oculus Rift and an immersive experience. So the infrastructure itself is going through a tremendous refresh cycle in order to meet the needs of the bandwidth to meet the needs of the low-latency environments and to support those new roles.

In addition to that is kind of this other challenge around the environment themselves. It used to be having security, like this whole idea of the evolution to a zero-trust environment. So it used to be predicated on the idea of castle and moat, so you would harden the app, you would harden that infrastructure, you’d provide defense in depth. People realized, “Hey, wait a second. A lot of the attacks are coming from inside the company.” That then gave way to this concept of zero-trust.

With zero-trust, there’s a role around securing workloads and workplaces and workforces. Then underneath that, of course, is the environment is changing with the proliferation of things like IOT end points and the fact that there’s no boundary anymore to the network environment. So that becomes a really important part of the infrastructure, too, is moving towards the zero-trust.

So intent-based networking, zero-trust environments, really focused on the application experience, especially as we move to the video conferencing and then being able to work from home, the teleworker, and supporting that with software-defined LAN. Like we talked at the very beginning, it’s an explosion of innovation in infrastructure and networking today.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, there’s so much to that, by the way, and that’s a great answer, very comprehensive. Saved me from having to really even add a whole lot of flavor, where I can jump into the next question pretty quick. But you did actually mention something that I don’t think we’ll talk a lot about, but a little bit, is that home worker and the security aspects are so big and it’s such an opportunity.

Cisco has done a really nice job, in my analysis, of putting itself in the position to really be a company that can help with those zero-trust, those threat vectors, because those are real legit and significant. There’s been a huge spike in that during this pandemic, and it’s definitely something that companies need to be thinking about. Not just getting people bigger pipes and connected to their applications, but keeping them all safe.

I want to talk about something you started to discuss a little bit. You were talking about software-defined being part of the way there, but then intent-based is really what Cisco is leaning into. Again, for the companies that are working with you already, those companies completely understand it. But for everyone else out there intent-based sounds great, but why is it so powerful? What are you doing beyond software-defined, which, by the way, was in itself revolutionary as it’s come out, and really are how you taking it to the next level with intent-based networking?

Jeff Scheaffer: Yeah. So thanks for that question, Daniel. I think a lot of times it helps to answer that question with a little bit of context of the history really matters. If we kind of look at this goal around this need to digitize networks today, and to be successful with that, to deliver the experience, the trust, and the cost efficiency of those new environments, we really have to think a lot about the modern network as a system.

When we think about it as a system, it means that it’s an integrated stack that starts with, for example, the ASICs that exist inside of the infrastructure itself. Cisco is investing heavily in getting a common ASIC, programmable ASIC, and the importance of that is it allows us to extend the economic life of the infrastructure and to be able to process traffic at wire speed. So that becomes really important, but it also is a key to how we enforce the management of application traffic on the network for both application experience as well as for trust.

Then up above that in our architecture is we get to this idea of a common operating system or programmability of the network so that we can have consistency in terms of how we enforce experience and trust. Then above that is we’d move above the infrastructure into how do we orchestrate across the virtualized network into the controllers. We’d have to be able to describe the intent. So what do we want to achieve in terms of application experience, what do we want to achieve in terms of which user is able to access which assets, and then have the network translate that automatically and enforce it.

The whole idea of intent-based network, it’s really about being able to deliver those outcomes and doing so by leveraging abstraction and automation in the configuration of the virtual or the digital network. That’s really kind of key. It’s a little on the technology side, but it is absolutely crucial in terms of how we deliver those outcomes.

Where Cisco is really differentiated in that in terms of what we’re doing there, there’s a new set of supporting technologies that have been developed to support that abstraction, the automated configuration, and to do that in a very efficient and cost-effective way.

Daniel Newman: That’s a great explanation. It was a little technical, but breaking it down, you’ve made some important points. By the way, I think your Silicon team will thank you, because I know there’s a big effort there. Because Cisco doesn’t always get the credit in silicon and optics that it deserves, and its role in terms of building web scale through silicon and being a real player in that space. It tends to get the credit where you’re talking about in the networking side, but it really is, it’s a casserole, if you’re wanting to use the food analogy.

Like I said, I wrote a piece in MarketWatch earlier this year and I made my predictions about the tech space in 2020. This was before the chaos. But one thing I said in my 10 predictions was silicon will eat the world, and it will continue to eat the world.

See, people keep saying software will eat the world. But software depends on what? Can’t do it without silicon. So many of these other advancements that we’re getting right now come down to you’ve got to have the chip, the CPU, the GPU, the VPU, the ASIC, the FPGA. You have to be able to build it, you have to be able to customize it or modernize it or enhance it, to be able to do all these different fancy applications that we’re doing.

Cisco is making a big play in terms of web-scale contributions for the internet. What was the event called? The Future of the Internet was the big Cisco launch of your own silicon. So I keep saying Cisco deserves more credit for its role in silicon, and it was great that you kind of incorporated that into your intent-based networking story.

But I also think there is a really big story about automation AI. Companies need this stuff to work. They need to reduce the touch points. They need to understand the threat vectors. They need to understand downtime and how automation can be implemented and created to make systems work cohesively and coherently without so much human intervention.

There’s too many workloads, too much data, too many failure points, and these systems, this intelligence, really comes down to, outside of us, we’re in tech, but for most people, they’re in manufacturing, they’re in automotive, they’re in retail grocery. They’ve got LAN and WIFI and networking and compute and storage, and all these things are not being done because they like to tinker. They don’t want IT involved with anything but keeping stuff running, and the less they spend on that, in most cases, the better.

Jeff Scheaffer: Yeah, absolutely. So we talked a little bit to the extent that as people digitize the network and they move to this intent-based architecture, there’s really kind of a couple of key concepts to it, right? So one of them we described earlier, which is I want to just kind of describe intent in terms of application experience and trust and I want the software to translate that intent into the configuration of the underlying physical infrastructure.

So one of the key concepts that it’s useful to understand is in a modern network, there’s the underlay, which is all around the physical and the RF connectivity of the infrastructure and the individual devices, and then there’s these overlays or the digitized virtual networks. But in order to configure that virtual network, you have to adopt what’s called the controller-led architecture. One of the key things around the controller-led architecture is it plays a lot of roles.

So it’s people implement these intent-based networks and they’re large scale, companies with hundreds of thousands of network elements, it’s very costly. It’s cumbersome to deploy them, to maintain them, to configure them, to keep them up to date. So one of the very first tasks that has to be accomplished in these environments is to be able to automate, to do the base automation of onboarding a network device from cradle to grave, so from onboarding to retirement, and then being able to maintain that through that life cycle, and then maintaining the service life cycle, how do I maintain that while it’s in an operating state?

So controllers today, they really do a lot of work around this fundamental automating the onboarding and the configuration and the maintenance of the infrastructure itself, and you just get a tremendous cost savings by doing that.

For example, we worked really closely with a company called Sega Sammy out of Japan, and what used to take them to maintain a relatively small environment of roughly 1000 network devices, where they would have to plan a one week management cycle, with one network technician working from home they can accomplish that in just a matter of hours to update their entire infrastructure.

So the automation just returns a tremendous kind of lever on labor, reduces the cycle times, it eliminates the error through standardization. So a huge benefit.

The second thing that happens once you kind of solve that problem is the next problem you start looking at is what is the experience of both the applications and the underlying infrastructure that delivers the applications. So being able to monitor the networks and the applications for the availability and the performance ensuring the reliability and the resilience of those environments, you need to have very comprehensive data collection. You’d want to take that off the streaming data so that you can react in real time, being able to use the system of intelligence, right?

If we think about from system of records to systems of engagement, systems of intelligence and autonomy, the one key thing we want to do with these intelligent systems is be able to pinpoint things proactively and then be able to predict problems and then respond in advance in order to avoid outages, but if things break, be able to pinpoint it and quickly restore the service. So this whole thing around the assurance and the analytics in the environment becomes the second big wave, and working on the real-time telemetry streams matter.

Then controllers get to our third wave of value, which is really around how do we ensure trust. Inside of the networks today, as we talked earlier, there’s no boundary, there’s no edge to the network anymore. There’s 28.5 billion IOT end points. Most of those are kind of open and connect by wireless by default. They’re closed systems. You can’t use endpoint security. So how do you secure an environment like that?

Malware is primarily encrypted, and so most endpoint security software detect it. The other kind of challenge that you’re having is that threat vectors are changing with, say, ransomware, which is attacking infrastructure, not the app.

So the network has a big role to play, and that’s where what we do around the things like software-defined access and software-defined LAN, where we’re able to segment the networks and control and instantiate the compensating control in the network itself, really matters. That’s this innovation cycle around controller-led architectures specifically to ensure kind of how these new intent-based networks work and being able to provide that insight in terms of the experience and the trust.

So we’re really excited by that scenario where Cisco is leading the market.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, absolutely. There is a lot there, Jeff, to unpack. The first thing I want to just say is bravo for reading my mind. It was almost like you knew where I was going to go next. I didn’t even get the question out and you jumped right into controller-led architecture. So I always like a guest that can sort of sense where I’m trying to take a conversation after my little silicon diatribe, but I thought that was also really important.

You bring out a lot of great points and a lot of clarity. I mean, this stuff’s complicated, and so even for technical people, there’s a lot to really unpack to try to understand, one, the intent-based networking, and, two, how to deliver this at scale for both better user experience for all the people who are impacted at the edge and also for IT to be able to manage it all successfully, keep it running, keep it safe, keep it secure, manage, like you said, dozens of new threat vectors that pop up legitimately on a daily basis, and do it now in a world where, as we started this show, where instead of having a couple of domains, physical domains, that you’re worrying about with people operating within, we now have, in some cases, like at Cisco, you have tens of thousands of physical domains and an edge that is almost boundless because of the scale and size, and really that continued discussion on where the edge really even is anymore as everything becomes connected.

So with that in mind, I only have a few more minutes with you. By the way, Jeff, thank you. Great job. You clearly have a passion for this stuff and also a very good understanding of it, so I’ll probably have to bring you back at some point because there’s more I’m going to want to get out of you. But let’s just kind of do a little forward-thinking, forward-looking here.

As IT architectures continue to be modernized, we’re seeing a greater mixture of software, infrastructure, and services. How is Cisco, on a broader scale, going to approach this shift and be able to continue adding value for its customers in driving innovation?

Jeff Scheaffer: Yeah, good question. So I think the one kind of most important thing, or a foundational tenant, is that the entire industry is driven by innovation, and the best way to drive that innovation is to just work very, very closely with all of our customers, understanding kind of the current problems that they’re facing, and then working with them to co-develop and design solutions to those problems. I’d say that that is the primary focus for us in terms of how we approach it.

There’s a wave of innovation, we talked about, that’s been driven through intent-based networking. There’s a wave of innovation that’s being driven around our Collaboration portfolio today. As we continue to work with the customers, now we see even more innovation coming.

So for example, teleworker or remote worker solutions. So as companies have moved the workforce to the home office, how do you extend the corporate network securely into the home office? So we’ve been innovating inside of our APs with this OfficeExtend AP capability. So the AP in the home office is able to distinguish the traffic for the corporation and connect back into the corporate node, and at the same time recognize the family traffic, which needs to be kept separate and private, and then of course with software-defined LAN, you can take that through a cloud on-ramp or off-ramp as necessary in order to redirect it to the internet instead of back hauling it to the corporate network.

So there’s a lot of things, from doing that as an example, that are helping companies basically extend the corporate networks into the home office in order to ensure that their teams remain productive as they were when they were in the office, and at the same time ensuring trust and security in that environment.

It’s also everything, for example, that we were talking about earlier about supporting kind of these zero-trust environments, it’s everything we do about supporting collaboration technologies and kind of the new bandwidth and latency requirements and video conferencing software, a lot of the work that we do around supporting that and giving preference to that, and a lot of what we’re doing even around software-defined LAN and the idea of the cloud on-ramp and off-ramp, which allows us to better handle traffic patterns.

Historically, companies would have to back haul traffic to the corporate office or the data center before they could go out from the internet. But now with today’s environments where the applications are in the data center in the cloud, there’s no need to take cloud traffic back into the corporation. So the software-defined LAN allows us to be much more flexible around that, as well as having very specific partnerships with the various kind of major hyperscale cloud providers, whether it’s Amazon or Google or Microsoft, and the work that we do together in terms of providing kind of better understanding of application flows and being able to provide better experience for those applications.

So just ongoing wave of innovation in terms of what we’re doing today in partnership with our customers and the industry.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it sounds like there’s a lot of vision there. I’ve always enjoyed hearing from Chuck every year when we come to the analyst events. I like two things a lot. I liked, one, he definitely seems to have a handle on the innovation story. Two, really great delegator. I always really admired the fact that he lets his execs on the different BUs really lead the way and lead the conversations because of the expertise required across the company that does as many things diversely as Cisco.

You start pulling this all together in this innovation story, I mean, just think about, for instance, the way what you and your team is working on has impacted the way Collaboration can deliver applications to users at home in thousands and thousands of concurrent locations. Like I said, we broke the VPN. The VPN at scale got obliterated in a day when we all came home, in a lot of ways.

Now, of course, wise IT people are wise for that reason. They’re able to figure the work around. But at scale, that opened a lot of doors. So this start stuff really goes up and down the stack, Jeff, but great conversation today. Really appreciate having you with me.

You know, I’ll give you a chance, any final thoughts? Anything you want to leave people with or anywhere you want them to go to learn more about what you guys are doing?

Jeff Scheaffer: Thanks, Dan. I’ve really enjoyed and appreciate having an opportunity to be on the show with you today. We’ve covered a lot of innovation and a tremendous amount of the technology that underpins that. As we wrap up, I’d like to leave your audience with just three key takeaways.

So number one is all about the business resilience and how at Cisco, we’re innovating in order to deliver that through intent-based networking and digitizing the network to drive the application and experience and trust. One more item under business resilience is how we’re leveraging the technology in order to give business context with capabilities like DNA spaces, which are uniquely allowing us or enabling us to bring the workforce back into the office securely.

Number two, that takes us into the whole idea of the work place transformation. So all of the innovation that’s going on in Cisco’s Collaboration and WebEx businesses, everything we’re doing around innovating around smart buildings, around how we’re bringing the networking and the IOT together in a secure way.

Three is everything we’re doing around the SD-LAN and then remote teleworker. So how we can support the new usage patterns as people are working both from the corporate office and working from home.

Then finally, I want to talk about this and have the audience takeaway that the secure future and everything that Cisco is doing around and innovating there around Cisco SASE architecture and the secure access service edge, where we recently won the CRN Top 2020 Tech Innovation for Networking in SD-LAN and Cisco’s approach and innovation around zero-trust architectures to help secure the workload, help to secure the workforce, and help to secure the workplace. Again, all powered on the intent-based networking foundations.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s absolutely terrific and it’s a great way to wrap up the show. So we’ll go ahead and throw a few links in the show notes where everybody can learn more. Jeff Scheaffer, Cisco, thank you so much for joining me here today on the Futurum Tech Podcast interview series.

Jeff Scheaffer: Thanks, Dan.

Daniel Newman: For everyone out there, go ahead and hit that subscribe button because we have lots of interviews just like this one. Well, none of them are just like this one, but we have a lot of great interviews out there across the land, talking about exactly what Jeff mentioned, future of work, but also diving deep into all kinds of different tech topics.

For this episode, though, of Futurum Tech Podcast, I have to say goodbye. I appreciate you all very much. We’ll see you again soon. Bye-bye, now.

Author Information

Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.

From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.

A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.

An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.

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