Hey, good morning, good afternoon, good evening,
depending on where you are in the world. This
is John Marchiando, and this is part of the Two
Guys in a PLC podcast. I am joined by my partner
in crime, Dave Gutshall. Good morning, good afternoon,
good evening. Yes. Welcome to another wonderful
episode. Just a reminder for all of you out there,
this is for entertainment purposes only, and
all opinions expressed are our own. They're not
reflective of our day jobs, our employers, our
spouses, partners, old flames, just our own.
Nicely done. Nicely done. Yeah, thank you. Man,
we have an awesome guest today, don't we, John?
My gosh. I can't actually believe he's here.
Absolutely, man. I mean, when you suggested this,
I'm thinking to myself, you think he'll actually
say yes? Yeah. Well, you reached out to him,
and sure enough, here we are. I'm telling you
what. So, yeah. So let's introduce our guest,
Mr. Albert Mitchell. Hello. Nice to be
here. So freaking glad, Albert. I still get giddy
when I think back to kind of my first days with
the – which was like the first kind of device
that I ever touched. I think it was a 2500, and
it had a token ring side and a 10 -megabit Ethernet
side. And to be talking to someone with so much
history, I'm just – I'm not even sure what to
say. So we kick it off with a question, and that
is – You've been on the industrial IoT side inside
of Cisco for what, a decade or more? Yeah. About
that? A little more. About that, yeah. But you've
been around a lot longer. So maybe talk about
kind of those early days a little bit and what
that sort of journey was into the, you know,
like what got us? Even thinking about going over
to the ruggedized side, because I remember that
2955, that was the first ruggedized piece of
gear that Cisco made that I ever touched. Yeah,
what brought you to the dark side, I guess is
the question, right? Yeah. Okay, I just want
to say one thing, Dave, as far as my appearance
fee, that the check... I'm a little suspicious
now. You're breaking up, hello? Yeah, there's
signals breaking up. Yeah, so the 2955, last
year we announced it hit its 20th anniversary
of the 2955, which I think is Cisco's first foray
into the industrial world. So that was back in,
so I was actually working as a software engineer
in the business unit that developed what was
the... the Catalyst 2500 and the Catalyst 2400.
And so one of our customers, one of our Catalyst
desktop switching customers approached us and
just said, hey, if you build it, we'll buy it.
And that just sort of kicked it off. There was
a market opportunity for us to expand the beyond
sort of enterprise. type deployments where you
have air conditioning into all right let's let's
just take the same technology and build it so
you don't need fans and so you can meet vibration
specifications and temperature specifications
and you go fanless and we'll sell it um and at
that time there wasn't enough competition and
so it actually did fairly well i mean it looks
a lot different than what we have today in terms
of you know din rail mounted ethernet switches
but that's really just somebody approached us
with the market opportunity and when we look
at like what was the cost to develop it it was
like okay let's take the same technology that
we have in our enterprise you know 19 inch rack
mount pizza box shrink it put it just the fundamental
portions of it and put it into you know a cube
that doesn't need fans and can cool itself and
that's just how it all started that's that's
wild so I mean, we didn't have the we. So Cisco
doesn't have the didn't have the competencies
yet, though. Right. Like meaning every piece
of engineering that was being done was about,
OK, that the thermals look different when I'm
inside of an enclosure with moving air. I can
pass air across these fins of these heat sinks.
And, you know, my the ambient in the in the room
is probably going to be, you know. hopefully
not over 70 degrees Fahrenheit. And you literally
were going to a new drawing board there, right?
There was no, there was no precedent for, Hey,
we're going to throw this into a small enclosure
and there's not going to be any fan at all. Yeah.
Yeah. So the whole, the whole figuring out how
to do the thermals to me, it's, it's, that's
an unspoken of strength or skill that you just
have to have. in your hardware mechanical team.
They just have to understand what the regulations
are, how to cool things, and how to understand
and meet thermodynamic requirements. And it's
not trivial because you can get, I don't use
the term lazy, you can get lazy and just make
it big, right? If you increase surface area,
you increase essentially the shell for which
you can dissipate heat. And that's the sort of
the lazy way out. of building something like
this. So the key is make it as small as possible
because the enclosures are not getting larger,
right? They're getting smaller. If anything,
they expect... And enclosure space is expensive,
so... And if anything, they expect the size to
at least remain the same as the technology advances,
right? So we went from fast Ethernet to gigabit,
but the size of the cube of the Ethernet switch
can't change, even though it's putting off more
heat. Yeah. So that's always been the cool thing.
And I think for me, I remember I was working
as a software engineer at the time in the business
unit that developed it, but I actually didn't
work on it. The guy that was sitting in the cube
next to me was actually like the main software
engineer. And he was looking at this thing and
showing it to me. And I'm like, this is the funkiest
piece of equipment I've ever seen. How do you
power this thing? Where's the power cord go?
And he was talking to me about DC power and things
like that. And this was back in 2004. And little
did I know, 10 years later, so I'd actually be
working in the business unit that's whose primary
goal is to sell those things. So a bit of a forecasting
of my career in some respects. Right. Yeah. And
you take me back to, you know, because I've been
doing this for over 30 years. So that just tells
you how long, you know, how old I am. And I won't
reveal that here. But I told Albert before we
started, you know, my age and what was going
on with me. But, you know, I go back to the days
when they were still using AC power in the panel
for PLCs and logic. And now they don't do any
of that. I mean, it's all DC. It's all 24 volt.
But I can remember back on the automotive plant
floors in the late 90s. Sorry, early 90s, where
they were using AC in the panels. It was just
crazy how unsafe that was. Yeah, what's funny
is my memory of that 2955 was we were trying
to extend Ethernet into a pump house, I think.
Pump room, pump house. And the problem was, is
that there was no place to land a new IDF. So
there was just, you know, logistics wise, there
was no floor space. There was no way to get up
into the, you know, the building columns around
the area. There was no nice, clean place to put
it. And so we got this crazy idea to, OK, we'll
just throw a. you know, throw an access switch
somewhere, mount it, you know, give us another
100 meters kind of thing. And it was like right
about that time it was, I want to say it was
released. We took one look at it and went, oh
my gosh, this is actually designed to be out
there, not inside an enclosure, not cool, because
every other IDF we had at the time was, of course,
HVAC controlled. And so part of this was, you
know, I don't have room for a cabinet. I don't
have room to mount something. And, man, yeah,
it just – yeah, it was great. Well, Albert, there
were still people doing – there were people doing
industrial switches before Cisco got into the
business, right? There were a lot of competitors
out there. Talk a little bit about that and how
we broke into the space and got to the position
we're in now. You put me on the spot, John. I
was actually in the software department back
then. And since I wasn't on this project, I don't
have a ton of understanding about what the business
case was or the business environment was for
industrial switching back then. So I can't really
speak too much to what the competitors were doing.
Sorry about that. No, somebody had to have seen
an opportunity there, though, because if you
make one business case, we put an entire group
together, or at least we started in 2004, right?
And it's grown to what it is today. That's pretty...
Yeah, pretty compelling, apparently. But I think
like anything, somebody came to us and basically
a customer or maybe a group of customers could
have been like water utilities or substation
automation companies or something that says,
look, if you build this, I'll buy it, right?
We rarely take something like we're just, you
have to realize back in 2004, just like it is
today, Ethernet switching is a big business for
Cisco. We're not just going to like willy -nilly
just build something for which and say, let's
build it and see if we can sell it. No, right?
We're turning down so many business opportunities
that we pretty much only build something if we
know we're going to sell it because somebody's
asking for it and they're willing to write a
check to cover the cost of development. So we
don't do something on speculation, right? So
I suspect that there was a customer or a group
of customers that had already been lined up.
for us to do this so that we knew we were going
to at least recover the cost of the development
team and then get into profitability within a
couple of years. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't
have done it. So I want to say we could have
been, maybe we were partnering with Rockwell
at the time or somebody like that who really
gave us a big, I'll say, we'll partner with you.
If you build this, we'll resell it and some other
opportunity. That's how it had to have happened.
But I wasn't on the project, so I don't have
the details for the original 2955. I was thinking
back to the year and the sequence, is that it's
interesting that that came out in 2004, and then
the first version of any kind of validated design
or similar for industry was about, what, three
years later? Maybe four? Wasn't Ethernet to the
factory floor? Wasn't that 07, 08, Albert? Yeah,
but there was a joint venture before that with
GE and Cisco, right? Before the Rockwell thing.
Ooh, you got me. I don't know. Yeah, I believe
there was. So I spent some time at GE Fanuc,
and I have some guys that moved on because GE
Fanuc no longer exists. And there was a joint
venture between Cisco and GE at one point to
take this into the factory floor, but I don't
think it went anywhere. Obviously, it didn't
go anywhere because we're now doing things with
Rockwell. Yeah, there was something there. Man,
I want to dig up the history of that at some
point, John. That'd be great, too. That's a hole
in my historical record, so to speak. Yeah, and
don't ask me how I pulled that out of my memory
back there. No, that's great. Albert, when you
were, so got it, you kind of got exposed early
on the software team, right, 2955. You saw this
sort of sales ramp, you know, the, again, CVD,
then along came the kind of partnership with
Rockwell. At some point here in the, you know,
five years later, roughly, you actually joined
that business unit. But what, what did the, like,
what were you working on in between there that
kind of got you to moving over to that? the industrial
business unit at the time. So in between the
launch of the 2955, I stayed on as a software
engineer. And then for my personal career, I
moved, I did one year of customer escalation.
So when customers had a problem, you have to
recreate it and figure out if there's a software
solution or if it's an issue, actual hardware
issue or software issue, then you sort of take
it back to the development team. And you explain
to them what it is. So it's like things escalate
past the technical support that you would normally
get up to the business unit. So I was doing that
for a year. And then I moved over to become a
technical marketing engineer. So then I went
over to the Catalyst product management team.
So now it's the 3750, about to become 3850 team
where we're starting to do stacking. of 3750s
3560s and now i joined as a technical marketing
engineer there so i got out of software development
it's like this is like internal Cisco stuff um
i got out of the software team and i joined a
different team i migrated over to product management
and that was about yeah i don't know about 2008
or 2009 or so so i moved over to product management
i've sort of never looked back i've been in product
management TME (Technical Marketing Engineer) ever since for catalyst so I did
sort of the same. So then I got sort of disconnected
from the industrial switch for a little bit.
But otherwise, but now the industrial switch,
now I see the industrial switch. Now it's the
IE 3000, right? So they made another version
of it to sort of address customer needs, the
IE 3000. And now I'm seeing it as a technical
marketing engineer that, you know, we have, it's
now in the product management group and we're
trying to now position that and sell it with
the sales teams. So this is. going towards 2009,
2010 or so. And what I see is the partnership
with Rockwell is now starting. And I think that's
what really drove, the IE switching really took
it up a notch. Once we had Rockwell on board
and we were... We had like the Ethernet to the
factory, like you mentioned earlier, that validated
design we worked on with Rockwell. We put Ethernet
switching in there and the partnership with Rockwell
that really took the business up a notch. That's
really what sort of catapulted it, I think, to
making it a really a big business for Cisco and
something that we wanted to continue to invest
in. Did you have to make a lot of changes to
the product when you started having that relationship
with Rockwell or was there a pretty easy transition?
So, well, Rockwell took what we had, but they
said, this is great, but. What we need is more
fiber. We need smaller. We need bigger. So remember
the IE 2000, I think this is all for entertainment
purposes. Yes, that's right. The whole list of
all the product IDs that you could get for the
IE 2000, because remember, I think they're like
10 to 15 different product IDs, different sizes.
They did different things. That was Rockwell
saying, we need this many SKUs. We'd have all
these different little market segments that we
want to sell into for our customers that have
all these minute detailed requirements that you
can't have with just one big switch. So that
was the sort of the SKU proliferation was Rockwell
driving. the PRD for the next version of industrial
switch after the IE 3000. So that became the
IE 2000. And for Rockwell, it became the Stratix
5700, I want to say. 5700, 5800. Anyway, that's
Rockwell really. So you want to talk about the
business and the relationship that we have with
Rockwell is they literally, I mean, they pretty
much wrote the PRD for the third generation.
industrial switch which for Cisco was the IE
yeah okay got it it's interesting that so the
first version of that Stratix that i had gotten
my grubby mitts on at the time was the 8000 which
was the 3k for to your point the IE 3000 it was
that actually was i probably would never have
come to Cisco if it weren't for the 3000 to the
ie3k because we were in the You know, this is
like, again, entertainment purposes only. We
were in the early days of discussing factory
transformation. And I'll never forget, I walked
into kind of this, I think it was called the
automated controls best practice circle, if I
remember right. Sounds like a big name. Yeah,
it was kind of crazy, right? Too many acronyms.
See, not just Cisco, those crazy acronyms. And,
you know, you've got this room full of... maintenance
folks and controls folks and everybody but IT.
And here I am, I'll say the wet behind the ears
IT guy, walking into the room with a switch,
but thankfully it didn't look like an IT switch.
It looked like, wait, the color matches the controllers
that we've got. And suddenly that defanged the
naysayers. The fact that it looked and was colored.
like a Rockwell controller. All of their dander
went down. They're like, oh, that's interesting.
Oh, look at that. It's right beside the PLC.
Look at that. It's the right size. Yeah. It was
crazy how all of the, I mean, look, there were
certainly naysayers, but it defanged and de -risked
and de -escalated. If I would have brought the
IE3K into that room, the exact same product,
it was colored like all of the... IT switches,
they would have run me out of the room. They
literally were judging the switch by its color.
Yep. Yep. They literally were judging the switch
by its color. And size to some extent, I'm sure,
right? Sure. Yeah. To your point, John, it fit
right. Like they could look at it and tell that
it fit nicely right next to that controller.
Yeah. Look like a SLC 500, except maybe smaller,
right? Yeah. Nobody's looking at technical specifications.
No. Yeah, there you go. No, that's exactly it.
Not at that point, right? So, yeah, I think the
other thing that's interesting when you talk
about the timeline is that it feels like it happened
maybe later than I was thinking. Because I was
thinking internally from a Cisco lens that the
business unit really took off. Between 04 and
07. And it almost sounds like it really took
off between 07 and 10. Yeah. So you have to realize,
but in between, so when the IE 3000 came out
and the IE 2000 came out, there was also, there
was two business opportunities. One was to keep
building, like from Cisco's perspective, when
we're looking at the business, you can keep building
switches for. manufacturing, but you needed a
different switch with different requirements,
quote unquote, for the utility sector. So we
actually split the businesses. There was a smart
grid business unit that we created for a while
and they built their own products. So for a while,
we had the IE 2000, which was for Cisco's purposes
intended for manufacturing. And then we had the
IE 2000U. which said for utilities, that was
built by Smart Grid, a different business unit
working for utilities. And we also had the CGS,
the Connected Grid Switch 2500, which was a 19
-inch rack mount, still fanless, but 19 -inch
rack mount, and the Industrial Ethernet 3010,
which was also now a 19 -inch rack mount, fanless,
industrial switch. The hardware... was very similar,
but the software was different. So the business
units actually shared like a hardware engineering
team, built two different products sort of based
off very similar hardware architectures, and
then put different software on them and had different
software teams. Yeah. I did not know that. I
did not know that. Yes. That's wild. But they
were still all traditional IOS at the time though,
right? Yeah. It was still running iOS, but they
had different teams. building the hardware and
the software and the support and product management
and the whole thing. We were completely different.
They had the smart grid business unit. And yeah,
I remember when that happened. So I want to say
that was, somebody's going to listen to this
and get the dates and say, yeah, you got the
dates all wrong. But I want to say 2010, 2011
maybe. Okay. That's when that split off. And
then I think right about 2013, They, 2014 timeframe,
they came back together. This point now, the
industrial team had split off. So I think there
was a, for a long time, the industrial switch,
like especially when this IE3000 was all part
of Catalyst, from an engineering, marketing,
product management domain organization. It was
just one more product within all of the Catalysts.
So the industrial switching, the IoT group within
Cisco had split off. And then that's when it
joined with the connected grid. So the connected
grid and the industrial switching team rejoined
and formed their own business unit again. Was
that when Vikas was involved? Yes. So Vikas comes
in. So Vikas is now like a VP, but he was the
director at that point. And he joined shortly
after the organizations had re -come back together
again in their own business unit to form IoT.
Gotcha. So for a while there, we had like, so
we were managing, we had product management.
So now product management, I'm in the product
management group. So I'm speaking mostly from
that perspective. So now product management,
we're managing, you know, the 2000 and the 2000U.
And that's... Interesting because unless you
look really close, they're the exact same hardware,
the same color, same hardware. You got to look
in the top right corner to see, oh, this one
has the U. That's why you can't use the SD card
on it because it's, you know, you can't take
the SD card out of the U and plug it into your
laptop and look at 32 because that's a different.
file system on the 2000U for your SD card. Things
like that were popping up all the time. If you
look really closely, you wouldn't notice the
difference between a 2000 and 2000U because they
had the same hardware team. So this was one for
smart grid, one for other industrial. Is that
what you're saying? Correct. Exactly. Okay. Yeah,
that's some wild history there. I had no – somehow,
right, you learn a lot when you're inside the
four walls, but the history lessons just didn't
– you didn't hear a lot of that. So that fills
in some huge gaps. What – when the joining kind
of the – right, it sounds like they were together
and then they split and then they came back together
again. In each one of those cases, that was no
– those entities were no longer part. of the
traditional cat business unit at that point right
they were their own essentially their own entities
is that right yeah their their own business exactly
yeah right own business so as we think of like
an architecture it was its own architecture essentially
inside yeah it's on pnl yeah yeah it's pnl exactly
its own pnl if you want to talk about from a
business perspective right yeah so yeah well
put yeah just like Webex is separate from Cisco,
I mean, it's got its own business unit. The firewall
team has their own business unit. Security does.
And so industrial switching was its own business.
Or industrial networking. So, Albert, what challenges
did you guys run into when you were trying to,
and you may not be able to talk directly to this,
but you had to develop a whole new channel and
route the market for this whole thing. What kind
of challenges did you run into? The biggest challenge
was getting the Cisco sales team to focus on
this and look for the opportunities. At this
point, the biggest challenge we had originally
was just the generalist sales teams were just
selling their data center, enterprise switching,
data center, security, wireless. They were selling
their normal stuff. And so to get them to also
sell and look for opportunities for industrial
was tough. Yeah, we had a few of the big customers,
like you can think like the Fortune 500 companies
that are sort of centered on manufacturing. Yeah,
they were buying it, but we were having a hard
time getting that next tier down. And we were
trying to get partners on board. We were trying
really hard to get another partner from Rockwell
or to get resellers to sign up and stop selling
the competition. sort of Hirschman and Moxa and
Siemens and start selling Cisco. That was the
struggle that I don't think we ever really got
very far with that. So that was really the big
struggle was getting Cisco sales teams to focus
on it and getting partners to come on board and
sort of break their relationships that they had
with the existing or the Cisco's competitors
like Hirschman, Siemens, Moxa and start on the
price list. So that was the big challenge. Yeah,
I mean, this is a classic challenge with the
internal teams, right? Because generally speaking,
their buying centers, their customers, the folks
they're talking to, they kind of look the same
from one customer to the other, just generally
speaking, almost regardless of vertical. Well,
purchasing, it all goes up through the same purchasing
department, typically. Right. Whereas as soon
as you flip to the industrial side, well, now
you're talking to lines of business. You're talking
to folks that, you know, they look potentially
they look drastically different between verticals.
And number one, the account team isn't necessarily
used to talking to them. Number two, to your
point, the path of least resistance is let me
keep doing the motion that I know and that I'm
comfortable with. And I argue that problem still
exists for some places. Well, in some cases,
it is the same purchasing organization. No matter
if you're talking IT or you're talking the OT,
the plant floor, it may go up to the same procurement
group. Yeah, for sure. Albert, I want to pivot
a little bit to maybe some other historical topics
and just get an understanding of maybe what you
knew or know or what have you. When I first joined
Cisco, I had talked to a gentleman by the name
of Roy Osterberg, and my recollection was that
he was on the original engineering team that
actually had started with, I think, the 5000,
like the first large chassis -based CAT. Okay.
How much overlap, if any, were there between
kind of those original CAT engineering teams
and the... those original ruggedization engineering
teams, it feels like like if it weren't for some
of those historical folks inside of those original
legacy business unit, like a lot of the products
that we have today just wouldn't have happened.
Oh yeah. Roy Osterberg. That's a name. That's
a blast in the past. Roy was quite the character.
I remember I got, I met Roy a lot. when I was
working as a TME in the product management group
for the Catalyst 3750, 3850 families. And Roy
at the time was running the solution engineering
team for enterprise deployment. So not just switching,
but routing, switching wireless for enterprise
deployments. And whenever you went to talk to
Roy and you had a question or you wanted to see
something or he was testing some sort of solution.
You had to make sure that you had an hour because
Roy was going to talk to you about everything.
Roy just liked to talk and tell stories. I mean,
he was quite knowledgeable. He had a huge history
about how things were done and why we got to
where we got. But anyway, the funny thing is
I remember like, oh man, if you go talk to Roy,
you got to make sure you have an hour. I love
people like that, though, because you learn so
much about what's going on or has gone on at
the company. Yeah, it's just one of those things.
Without fail, unless Roy was really, really busy,
which, I mean, he was, but he always had time
to sit down and tell stories. Yeah, so Roy was
on the, so he came in. So there were, now we're
going to go way back, Cisco's engineering acquisitions.
So Cisco essentially bought, acquired three Ethernet
switching companies. I forget the names of all
of them, but one of them essentially. It turned
out to be what was the large chassis, which is
the 5000, eventually became the 6000, the 6500,
which was sort of Cisco's frontline Ethernet
switch. That was the big switch. Then there was
a medium -sized one that we had that was more
focused on large -scale wiring closet, which
was the Catalyst 4000, then became the Catalyst
4500. Again, this is a chassis mount system.
And then the third one they bought became...
The Catalyst 2950, 2940, 2950, then became the
3750 and the 3850. It's now the Catalyst 9300,
but it's the pizza box, right? It's the single,
the one rack pizza box. So Cisco actually had
three different switching companies. They were
all running different operating systems at the
time. Remember like Catalyst, I mean, originally
the 6500 was running CatOS. And you can, when
you search, for stuff you sometimes you still
get CatOS comes up i'm sure it's still running
out there in a while replaces i mean it was a
great product 7.6.6 was the most stable CatOS
code i ever ran there you go you got me man nope
right over my head there yeah right over my head
i'm a controls guy i uh yeah i actually i remember
those days i i resisted the switch i wanted For
the longest time, I wanted nothing to do with
unified IOS across the 65s. We tried it a couple
times in the lab, and it just was not stability,
if I remember right away. And so we ran one version
of iOS on the MSFC and another version of CAT
for all the Layer 2 stuff for a long time. Dude,
anytime you say the word unified, it means it's
not. I mean, unfortunately, that's like air gap.
When you say air gap. Yeah, right. It's really
not air gap. I'm sorry. I interluded there with
the Cat OS version. No, you got Roy Osterberg.
So Roy worked. So he came in either he came in
on the acquisition of the big of the company
that. was building the catalyst 65 what became
the catalyst 6500 and so he was always sort of
oriented towards big deployments data centers
and those kinds of things whether you put the
catalyst 6500 um yeah i don't know why why did
we you asked me about Roy Osterberg and i went
off on like the history of uh Cisco's no so No,
this is great. No, that was great. Yeah, I just
– it's funny for two reasons. One, because I
remember him the same way, is that he had such
a character, and any time you'd ask him a question,
he would just download so much data. Like, I
wish I could – I wish I would have had a recorder
along. I could play those suckers back, right?
But the history of when he had started touching
that original 5000 chassis dawned on me that
there was a lot of – early engineering help that
were probably key to eventually breaking off
and, again, developing those initial business
units, both for utilities and, would you say,
smart grid? I think it was smart grid you said.
I mean, yeah. Okay. I was thinking, at the same
time, to your point, Albert earlier about here's
a market. You see some competitors in it. They're
doing something that potentially Cisco could
get a piece of the pie of. But we know engineering
from a standpoint of traditional IT spaces, IT
protocols, IT capabilities. It just feels like
such a pivot to suddenly being able to do all
of these other things that You know, even today,
there are scenarios when we release a new product
where, you know, you throw it in a larger manufacturing
plant or similar, and you've got a whole bunch
of corner case legacy devices that suddenly don't
behave on the sucker because, you know, even
our well -documented, well -traveled testing
procedures aren't catching it. Again, they're
corner cases. So I can just imagine the hill
to climb at that point was just so big back then
when we made those decisions. Yeah, and for me,
I'm five years in with Cisco as part of the fluid
mesh acquisition. So I'm still wet behind the
ears as far as the internal Cisco stuff goes.
So I love these conversations because I learn
a lot. Every time we do one of these little more
focused podcasts on Cisco, I really... really
enjoy and learn, learn a lot. But the question
I was going to ask was, how did you two get to
know each other? Where did you first meet up?
Oh my goodness. That's a great question. It seems
like we've been working together a long time.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to remember. I'm so bad
with like the initial, I mean, Albert, I was,
I'll give you my first couple of your history
and maybe that'll explain where we crossed paths
first. I came in under Brian Tantzen at the time
in IVSG. So I was in the business unit as a BDM
focusing on solutions, taking something from
Cisco, something from a partner, smooshing it
together, testing it at a customer, and then
seeing whether or not we can productize it. I
didn't move to sales until after, like, 16. And
then I was part of the... digital transformation
team as a practice advisor for a bit until that
blew up. And then I went over to, at the time,
it was our industrial, I'm sorry, it was our
IoT software team, software only, with the term
that must not be named that started with a K.
I actually know what that is. I'll share that.
Oh, my gosh. That's a podcast in and of itself.
But, Albert, I'm thinking it was. While I was
on Brian's team in either 15 or 16 that we first
crossed paths. Okay. That could very well be
because I was full on as the product TME then
for industrial switches at that point. And I
was just starting to get into all the solutions
that we had for anytime we're putting an Ethernet
switch in a solution, which should be every solution.
Yeah, yep, absolutely. And now, as I'm thinking
and memories jogging, it was probably at one
of the first. So we used to have in -person Rockwell,
Cisco, CVD discussions where we basically meet
around a table. Somebody would own the tracking
document as to what's coming up and being changed,
what's coming down the docket next. I want to
say you were probably in one of those rooms with
Paul Didier the first time I met you. Could very
well be. I bet that's the case. And if for some
reason it wasn't those, then it was at some point
when I probably did a presentation in San Jose
and you were one of the distinguished speakers.
Yeah, there's not going to be probably an exact
moment. It probably was going to be one of those
like larger meetings. There was lots of people
there, lots of new faces, both for me at the
time. For Cisco and Rockwell or sales organizations.
But it's sort of slowly but surely. But I think
what we really started working together is I
think once you went over to sales, I think that's
when we really started collaborating a lot more
on customer problems and products and how are
we getting it out there. And I think that's when
we realized when it comes to manufacturing. gut
shawl really knows what's going on you can tell
that all this experience i'm like okay he's going
to be an asset that i can use here when we need
to start you know having questions related to
manufacturing and i need to get somebody's opinion
so we may have met but i was once you made the
move to sales and you were kind of focused you
did a lot of focusing on manufacturing okay gut
shawl really understands what's going on i think
it doesn't have any opinion yeah No, no, no,
no. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, sometimes my opinion
gets ahead of me. That's for sure as heck. Good,
bad, or ugly, right? Thank you for the compliments,
Albert. There's nine minutes left here, and I
was going to turn it back on you and say that,
you know, you're on this sort of... you know,
potential off -ramp or whatever you want to call
it. And, you know, as you can imagine, all I
see is all this history walking out the door
and the competency. And, you know, look, you
can teach a lot of people a lot of things. And
people can learn skills and learn techniques
and get good at something, get great at something.
All of that training, all of that. technique,
all of that knowledge. It doesn't also educate
on the history, the why, what happened, why we
do what we did back then. All of those kinds
of things are going to walk out the door when
you finally hang up your Ethernet cable. And
we are going to be lesser because of it. And
I'm hoping that your off ramp is short. Well,
and any time I hear your name in conversation,
Albert, and this is not a trivial thing at all,
every time I hear your name, people are very
complimentary of you. And I really don't know
you very well at all. We've swapped messages
on WebEx several times, but I haven't been involved
with you like Dave has. But I hear nothing but
just glowing things about you and your character
and your knowledge of. not only Ethernet, but
just of the business in general. So it's been
great sharing some airtime with you. The man
is an institution. All right. You guys are making
me blush. Well, you never know when the video's
off. Yeah, exactly. It's good stuff. I often
heard that people always say that I have a great
voice for, I have a great face for radio. Great
face for radio? Yeah. Great that we're on or
there's no video. People are going to find it
much more enjoyable just to listen to us. They
could be. Yeah, I'm with you. I want nothing
to do with the video side of things. That may
change one day when we do this, but it's definitely
less stressful to not have to worry about. My
voice is bad enough. I only want to couple my
face with it. Harsh. So I got a question for
you, Albert, as we kind of get closer to wrapping
here. what kind of advice can you give us to
make sure that we are, you know, successful and
are able to move the ball forward? You know,
not just within Cisco, but just, you know, from
what you've learned in your time in industry,
you know, what can you kind of leave us and people
that will listen to reflect on and focus on to
be successful? Sure. The first thing that sort
of comes to mind is what I've been learning about
product management and sales for a long time.
And one of my old bosses talked to me about this
and he called it blocking and tackling. It's
like the fundamentals. So when we go out on sales
and we come out with marketing, we always want
to market and advertise the shiny new thing,
some new feature, some technology. And that's
great. We have to show the innovation. But if
you don't understand the fundamentals, like if
you're talking about using football as an analogy,
you can have the shiny new quarterback, right?
But if you can't block and tackle, you can't
win any football games. So I always think it's
always the fundamentals. You can't lose track
of the fundamentals. Not everybody wants that
shiny new thing, that new feature, that new technology.
They still just need, you know. I still need
100 megabits, right? Full duplex and make it
work with spanning tree with these different
vendors. And as an example, like they just need
the fundamentals. And I think don't get too far
away from understanding that most customers need
the fundamentals to just sort of work. That's
what I... find that I kept coming back to, you
know, I had to participate in a lot of, we had
to advertise and talk about the shiny new thing.
And that's great. And I, I like doing that too.
I like innovating and building new things, but
from sustained success, the fundamentals just
always have to be there. And that comes to like
product quality, both hardware and software.
So maintain product quality and hardware and
software. as well as show the ability to innovate
and push the needle forward so you can always
see a value in working with Cisco and Cisco's
products. I think that blocking and tackling
is what I would remind everybody to just stay
true to the fundamentals. Back to basics. Back
to basics. Yeah, great advice. Yeah, thank you
for that. I think that's the old, you know, sometimes
we miss the... You know, that forest for the
trees, right? We're so focused on where we're
going and what the next step is and what customers
are going to want three years from now. And so
let's, you know, think about the next innovation
that's going to get everybody excited when, you
know, it's still fundamentally about a last mile
connection that everybody knows that understands
compatibility with everything that's out there
at a. form factor and speed with security capabilities
and layer two convergence capabilities that people
can trust. That's it. Yeah. And we can't forget
about that or get away from that. That always
has to be part and parcel with whatever we're
doing. Yeah. Yeah, we could stack something on
top of it, but the basic level, it's got to be
reliable layer two and layer three connectivity,
right? Exactly. Yep. Resilient, reliable. Resilient.
Yep. Yeah, 100%. In fact, I'm reminded of this
when I'm in the process of switching home firewalls
and all of the names withheld to protect the
guilty. But I'm missing features and detail and
the ability to get data to understand what's
going on because everybody's obfuscating it,
trying to make it easier to look at. and yet
all i want is like somebody give me a freaking
syslog of like all of the freak like i want to
turn debug mode on yeah so yes definitely i love
the advice you don't forget about the don't forget
about the basics what it's really there for um
yeah Albert we thank you so much enjoy your off
ramp uh or enjoy your on -ramp or enjoy your
yeah right because it's an on -ramp potentially
there's something else right yeah there you go
That's true, too. Thank you, sir. Appreciate
your time. Albert, it's been a pleasure. It's
been a lot of fun. This is the second podcast
I've ever done, and it's nice. You guys make
it easy, so congratulations. Right on.