How many screens do you have accessing the network at once?

Keeping up — let alone thriving — in this terabyte world requires our customers to architect their networks in completely new ways.

Like the elasticity of your favorite sweatpants, success of the network hinges on the ability to adapt to consumption. Being able to transform and perform at scale isn't just essential for service providers, but vital for enterprise, government, web-scale, or hyperscale companies too.

That's why we gave our Service Provider Business a fresh moniker: The Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group. MIG for short.

We recently sat down with Jonathan Davidson SVP and GM, to discuss everything from our customer needs to conquering the digital divide. Oh, and a little career advice too.

Q: What does our Mass-Scale Infrastructure customers need from Cisco?

Jonathan: Scale changes everything. Typically, we get involved with the customer because they need significant amounts of capacity and bandwidth or have a substantial number of users. For many of these customers, the network is their business. So, there's a tremendous amount of focus on making sure the network is always up and running.

Q: How dramatically have those needs changed in the new landscape of working from home?

Jonathan: The networks were basically built to send network traffic TO your houses. They're not really built to send vast quantities of data out of your home.

But now it's like we have these little production studios and we're all broadcasting live video. That has put an incredible amount of strain on the networks that was not there before. But overall, the industry and Cisco, have done a phenomenal job of responding to the changing needs.

Q: How has the response been to our Internet for the Future launch? Any surprises?

Jonathan: It's gone mostly as expected. The largest customers knew it was coming because we worked with them to make sure we were building the right thing for the right use cases.

One surprise was its halo effect. You hear about this in the auto world. They build the latest and greatest sports car, and then people buy the four-door sedan because it's related.

People heard about our Cisco 8000 series router or Silicon One technology and wanted to learn more about what we were doing. We shared all of our innovations with them. Then they ended up buying a different routing product that solved their needs. So while I'm skeptical the halo effect works with car companies, we have proof it definitely worked for us.

Q: Speaking of business models, can you comment on the flexible consumption model?

Jonathan: We started this model as a pilot about two and a half years ago — and greatly expanded it in December. To date, we have around $740 million in flexible consumption bookings from nearly 600 unique customers.

A lot of the ideas for this model come from the sales team. It's fun to solve the technology problem. It's also very fun to solve the business economic problem as well. The flexibility it provides has been a major success — but there is so much more we can do.

Q: How does the Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group help achieve our goal of an inclusive future?

What we have seen over the last four months is the prevalence in the global digital divide — even here in Silicon Valley, where you would think it wouldn't be a problem.

Knowledge is a great equalizer. It's difficult to obtain knowledge without connectivity. So if we can create more connectivity at a better cost factor, it will lift all boats.

The innovations we're bringing to market lower the traditional costs of radio by up to 30 percent. We're also helping to lower the costs of optical and routing infrastructure by 40 percent. This means it will be easier for many more people to get on this infrastructure.

The United Nations has declared the Internet a basic human right. I'm certainly a big believer in it, so is my team. A tangible example of this is our sponsorship of MuralNet.

Q: What advice do you have for someone just starting at Cisco?

Jonathan: I started as a Grade 4. One thing that was true back then and remains true today is that no matter what question you have, regardless of the topic, you can find an expert here. And, 99 times out of 100, that expert is more than willing to spend time with you and answer your question.

To me, this speaks volumes about our company. Anybody can talk to anybody about any topic.

Q: Anything else you'd like to share with new employees, or anyone at Cisco?

Jonathan: I would like them to know you can really do anything here. Over the years, people have asked me, "How do you get to go and try new things?" The answer is — you just go and do it.

Nobody is going to stop you. As long as you're getting your work done and you have your Cisco hat on, if you want to go explore something or learn a new skill, you'll be supported, encouraged. I was. I find that very empowering.

There's also no central power source that is all-knowing that can see the future. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen technologies I wasn't quite sure about. Then six months later, it's obvious it was the right thing to do. We don't want to squash things when they are beginning, because you never know what they might turn into.