>> Announcer: From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio and looking forward, we're going to be digging into one of my favorite topics and also the community always loves when we have it. Talking about networking, of course. Happy to welcome you to the program. I have two first time guests. First of all, we have Mike Saur. He is a solutions architect of NetDevOps with CCI. And joining us a long time friend of the program. First time on the program, Omar Saltun, who is a leader, product management for Network Services Orchestrator with Cisco. Omar and Mike, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks, nice to be here. >> Thank you, sir. >> All right. So Mike, if you could just set up for us, CCI, Cisco partner, give us a little bit about the organization, what you specialize in, what you're known for. And tell us a bit about your role there. >> Sure. CCI systems is a trusted partner for typical mid market size service providers. That's primarily the focus and that's a lot of different areas of the business, cable access, CMTS, security, data center and now this next evolution of adding NetDevOps as that next step for trusted advisor. I've been in my role for about a year now at CCI with a strong passion for automation and finding the right fit tools to solve problems for our customers, whether that's a commercial product or a open source tool. So a lot of different problems out there and no one size fits all. So it's my passion to bring those types of solutions to CCIs customers. >> Wonderful. Mike, I'm hearing a lot of the themes that I'm very familiar with. I'm sure our audience is when we talk about Cisco, when we've gone to Cisco live, we've been in the DevNet zone. So having a lot of discussions about that NetDevOps piece, can you talk to us a little bit more, just the partnership with Cisco. I would love to hear how NetDevOps fits in with what you're doing and how that fits with Cisco too. >> Yeah, I've been working with Cisco on and off for the past 18 months to try to think outside the box. As we know, Network Services Orchestrator was primarily targeted at the large providers that have the investment resources, the programming staff, to be able to do that. So over the years, having various discussions with product management, Cisco and CCI have come together to partner to solve two of the big problems in our space for our customers. As far as the math problem of the investment that's needed to bring up Network Service Orchestrator, and then also the programming piece of that. So not a lot of the providers in the mid market space have that expertise. So CCI and Cisco are really pulling that all together with various trusted partners to bring that to life for them in a shorter timeframe, with more sets of controls, to bring them up to speed faster so that they can it with a martial arts type journey of starting small and integrating over different phases of the life cycle of automation. >> Great. Well, Omar, let's pull you into the discussion here. It tends to be in general from a product standpoint, a little bit easier to grow up market. We want to talk a bit about the mid market, so that Network Services Orchestrator, NSO. Help explain how that really can support the mid tier as Mike was saying. >> Sure, so we were a little crazy, we started at the top and starting to work our way down. So we're well established with tier one service providers, large enterprises, we have good markets penetration there. I think for us, it was a lot of growth opportunity down into the mid market, both on commercial and tier two, tier three service providers. I know that the challenge in NSO is awesome, but it's got a steep learning curve. So, these partnerships like the one here is perfect because it allows mid market customers to access the capability. But at the same time, they have someone to hold their hands. They have partners like CCI, that have both the technical expertise, as well as kind of understanding kind of what customer problems are, what operations and problem scaling look like in mid market, not just a tier one where the different markets, different requirements. >> Mike I would love to get your viewpoint as to what's happening inside your customers. So networking in general, obviously there's always new technologies that they need to integrate, but there's also the skill sets. NetDevOps, of course, helping pull people along to work closer with developers, coding more something we have to talk about. So the mid tier customer specifically, what challenges they face with bring us into some of those conversations, if you would. >> Right, so I preach a lot and talk about the vicious cycle of not automating. They don't have time 'cause they're too busy doing the day to day jobs. And I love to get into that vicious cycle and kind of bust that up and help to kind of think differently why they need to operate their networks differently. And they can take a lot of those tools and techniques from the software world and really help leverage them on their networks. There's just a skills gap right now with the mid market type folks. They're overworked, stressed. And with obviously the growth of IOT, more devices means more work. It's just a volume metric problem that certain automation tools can really make a difference in their world. And that's really what my passion is at, reducing human error, helping those businesses provide more uptime for their end customers and just driving a different way to operate networks in more efficiently in accurate way. >> And part of that... >> Please go ahead on that. >> And part of that is just not. You know those are the technical expertise, but there's also the how do you stitch things together? Any automation strategy is going to have more than one tool. And there's the idea of how do we stitch tools together? How do we build processes? How do we help up-skill customers? Those kinds of things. I mean, this is kind of the all the pieces that come together when you kind of mesh the technology and the apart for capabilities together. That's really what drives successful automation projects, and then get some of those problems solving and added value that we're talking about here. >> Yeah. I mean, Omar, when I think about scale and I think about automation, service fighters, you think would be some of the leading edge for some of that? Maybe just refresh our audience a bit as to how you help them along and how much, they used to kind of build a lot of their own toolings and that's challenging if you have to keep doing it itself. So why do they turn to Cisco for some of these solutions? >> I think two things, one, we build tools that survive scale, right? For NSO, we have customers managing hundreds of thousands of nodes at one time. So there's a scale on performance that comes from building SB class tooling. But the second piece is just understanding, you know, the operational environment service providers, have they have demanding requirements in terms of SLA scale, reg compliance, those kinds of things. And that's really what we've brought to the table is not just tools that have the power and the scale, but kind of understanding what the operational environment is for the typical tier one SP and making sure the tools mentioned to that. >> Michael... Please go ahead. >> Yeah, absolutely. And the idea of that businesses are changing fastly and keeping up with that speed of innovation is very difficult. And not to mention to, I mean, as a trusted partner for our customers, maybe the answer's not Cisco every time to be honest, maybe there's a different tool. So if we have a tool like NSO that could drive other vendors equipment, I think that makes customers feel safer, better, not vendor lock in. So the power that NSO brings is second to none, in my opinion. So I'm just all about flexibility and in solving problems for our customers. And to me, Network Services Orchestrator is that product. But like I said, there's a lot of integrations that need to be done and we need to break it down for these customers and get them to realize the value of it faster instead of the large deployments that you've seen in the tier one type of space. >> Yeah, Mike, you bring up a really good point. When I think traditionally about automation, we take a process or maybe we optimize a process and we automate it, but what companies need today is I need to react fast and I need to be able to make changes in the future if that's needed. So not fossilizing something, but being able to move forward. So it sounds like with NSO, some of your other things that you put together, you're helping customers not only do what they need today, but be ready for the future. Do I have that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, it's just another progression of what CCI already is. That trusted advisor, we have the great opportunity that we talk to so many different providers of the same size, same business goals that we bring best in breed. And our talent that we have at CCI is just amazing and that's a passion that we're trying to get out there into the world that, Hey, we have horsepower and we're ready to help. We're about making lives better. So it's exciting. >> Yeah certainly in the mid market, one of the things we see is customers doing less building and more assembly. So in tier one, they have the time and resources to build stuff from scratch, to write services from scratch, those kinds of things. Mid-markets much more of a simply play, taking things off the shelf. No, maybe a little NSO, but it's also paired with a little bit of Ansible, a little bit of Python, and that's how they're going to handle their automation requirements, both, 'cause it's probably faster and probably in the long run, easier to maintain. >> Well, yeah. You bring up a great point, Omar. When I think traditionally that mid market and the channel partner often would be delivering prepackaged solutions. But today's solutions, you still need that a little bit of flexibility, that little bit of programming, they're not going to, throw a team of PhDs on it like some of the largest customers do. But they still need to be able to put things together and make them fit for what they need and ultimately their customers need. >> Yeah, I mean, every automation project it's still a snowflake. You take something or free VPN, right. Everyone does it, but everyone does it differently. There's no better, there's no worse. But if you're going to automate that you kind of start with an 80% solution, but then you need to line it up whether that's customer's infrastructure, their operations, their staff capabilities and those kinds of things. That's kind of getting over the finish line what CCI brings to the table in the mid market, sure. >> Yup. Mike, it's funny. I'm curious. CCI, does it have any relation with CCIE 'cause when we're talking about that skillsets that we need, obviously, you start, you think about Cisco certifications. How do you keep your team up on the latest technologies, making sure that they can be that trusted advisor that your customers need? >> Well, of course it's a combination of different things, classical learning, but I would say one of the big things is our collaboration capabilities. We have experts in many different areas and usually they have a secondary skill set and we collaborate. And a lot of times we make our own internal training that's more specific to our customers. So example, I really try to recommend to customers to move to EVPN technologies, but there's that learning curve that they don't know how to configure them. Next gen ethernet type of technologies for service providers. So by building an EVPN model and NSO, we're empowering them to leverage that sooner, faster with a smart tool like NSO. And that's really, some of the value that we have, we know what most of our customers use. The big guys tend to use layer three VPNs a lot of time. I would say just that a majority of our customers are very L two VPN vase or infrastructure services, and even offering them up to their own customers. So having a somewhat pre-packaged 80% as Omar had mentioned, and nothing's ever really the same all the time, but 80% of it probably is. And then we'll come in and then we can finish off that last 20% to make it come to life for that customer with a little bit of customization. So making it fit for their environment. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the biggest challenges out there for anyone is, okay, when do I have to revisit what I had? Is there a new technology? Is there a new way of doing things? So you just laid out like, you know, one way that customers, okay, this is the way I should be in my size thinking about VPN. Anything else? What, what kind of key things should people be hearing and they're saying up, if I have this problem, providers like CCI can help. >> Right. Just trying to increase the health of their network by having consistency checks. Over the years, networks have config wonder. It's very hard to keep that up even in the mid market networks. So the cleaner that your network is, the more uptime you're going to have, the easier it is for your network engineers and allows you to scale. Like I said, the time to businesses is just going rapidly. And being able to empower other teams like say knock or even sales engineering to build those L2VPNs for the customer. If you can build them faster by not escalating tickets to the core engineering team, you serve the customer faster and you freed up those network engineers to maybe be more proactive about building out the future network. Cause right now they're just stuck in that day to day grind. So config consistency, and like primary, like service builds L2, L3 VPN. Those are very popular. And one thing that I always like to challenge customers with is that a lot of times they're like, well, we can do it ourselves. And maybe some of these guys have a developer teams and typically they're more focused on the public facing website, internal apps. And I challenged like maybe you could... but what's your time worth to you? And the amount of man hours that were put into NSO, jumpstart you faster. And a lot of times I think you're going to gain more value in just getting that product that you can customize. 'Cause at the end of the day, it's a developer platform. So you bring it to life in your environment. >> Absolutely, there's so many things now that companies need to make that decision. Can they shift left? Can they push it to the platform? Are there solutions that just make things easier so that you can focus on really the things that are important to run your business and get the best utilization out of your people and the skillsets. Wonderful. Mike, Omar want to give you both, give us the final word takeaways you want people to have regarding kind of the opportunity that they can take advantage of, especially in the mid tier. Mike maybe we'll start with you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. I am just passionate about getting CCIS name out there. Not only for NetDevOps, but all the other practices that we have at CCI to be that trusted advisor and come talk to us. We have account teams that already, we have systems engineers that are ready. And I feel like one thing leads to another and it snowballs so reach out and I'd love to have a conversation with every single one of them, whether it's a small organization or a large organization, we're here to help. And that's super important to us. >> I think for us, we see automation start, tactically to science project. So ones trying to deal with the pain pointer or dealing with something here frustrated with which is, I think where most folks start. I think that the trick is to work with your peers, talk to your leadership and figure out how you go from science project to strategy and kind of map out the longer journey and be a little thoughtful as you pick tools and figuring out what you want to automate and make sure it has some value to. >> Mike Saur, Omar Sultan, thank you both for joining. Appreciate the update and especially on the CCI and Cisco partnership. >> Thanks too. >> Thank you. Have a great day. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Net App and The Cube's ecosystem partnership. >> Welcome back, we're here live at The Cube here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman have been co-hosts all week here for three days live coverage. Day one and I'm winding down. Great keynotes, CEO of Cisco laying out the next generation network and it's not just the old networking, it's a whole nother thing. Our next guest is Salman Asadullah, who is the CTO and VP in Engineering at Netnology.io. Like technology, Netnology.io, former Cisco fellow been twenty- >> Distinguished engineer. >> Distinguished engineer, sorry, fellow engineer, well you look distinguished today. So how many years have you been at Cisco? >> 22 years. >> 22 years, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for the invitation. >> So I got to ask you, before I get into the company, which we were talking before we came on camera, you doing really, I think you're on the front end of a big wave we see, certainly in The Cube, but you've been at Cisco 20 years and I've been working with Cisco since the beginning of time, 1993, in some capacity or another in the industry and I've had friends that have sold companies to Cisco. There's always been a debate within Cisco's engineering organization as to how to move up the stack. One team, yes no. So there's been but now it's time. Can you add some color and reaction to that because I think that's kind of where it is now. So all those conversations, even go back 15 years ago, where in the stack should we go? What's the right time? How about some of the history of Cisco and now they're moving up the stack. >> Yeah so I think first of all just to start with, our company name is Netnology.io but our tagline is full stack system integrator because we call ourselves a full stack system integrator because we know end networking, we know Cisco but we know how to move up in the stack as well. With the APIs and the STKs and what not. So the thing what is happened when you kind of look into this from Cisco's perspective, and I was there for 22 years, I am what I am because of Cisco, like when people say in Cisco when they work in Cisco I am Cisco but I still say I am Cisco because all of our business, 70% of our business is around Cisco. But the thing is when people are in Cisco, from Cisco's perspective when they say okay we are a software company and all of that good stuff, they look at the software from a networking perspective but the world, the industry when they say software, they are kind of talking about up in the stack from the application perspective. This is what you see even in Cisco they are sort of trying to pivot and all of the requisitions which are happening is around that. That they are acquiring companies which are basically up in the stack. There are more application based companies and also they are building organically some stuff in there as well. >> What's interesting is that the trend is their friend right now because they are getting to have their cake and eat it too. They are going to have best of both worlds. The networking is becoming more and more important with something to find and then you've got Kubernetes which Google Cloud is out there on the stage today. You've got Kubernetes and containers and Service Mesh is coming on that all look like networking. It's got words like policy, QOS, I mean this is networking world moving it up the stack. What does that mean for a customer? Is that the path in your mind? >> Yeah and I'm a big believer of that. I'm a big believer of that even before leaving Cisco for last five years of Cisco, I was basically working around all of these SDN, NFE, APIs and making sure in organizations I was leading or I was part of that how do I enable our engineering force to do some of that, to gain those capabilities. This is what we are trying to mimic on a much smaller scale in our company. That the way we sort of call it we are a bunch of hybrid engineers. The people who are CCIs but they can also code as well. This is our sort of a focus because just like what you said John, five years ago or three years ago when people talked about this stuff it was only about if you are a data center, cloud these things matter. But now, if you really see all Cisco's solutions are around APIs, around STKs, around SDN and NFE concepts. So let's say if you look into Cisco enterprise solution like SDA or SDVAN it's all around that. If you look into collaboration, Spark, Intropo it's all around that. So the point is that for any network, for any engineer or any organization to get to the next level they have to go through this evolution. >> And that's scaling too then. The network's got to scale and the new software environment. >> You bet. >> So there has been a big debate in the networking world, Salman, for many years, okay I ran networks, wait I have to be a coder. Maybe there's not that skillset. Will my solution providers and my software providers and the platforms I build on take care of some of that or is the traditional role of the network dead? You're saying your company's got a hybrid role but what percentage of people that are the CCIEs and the network admins today, how many of them need to be coding, developing, working with APIs and everything in the future? >> Yeah I think the way I sort of look at it that there's some push back. There is some push back but mainly more in the younger generation. They get it, they get it because if I give you an example of our company, we have 15 to 20 people company, the last two hires we had these were fresh grads, computer science grads and what I asked them to do, first six months go get your CCNA so then they start to understand some of the basics of the networking so they can work with our senior CCI engineers who know how to write 50 lines of five tone script but they can work with the coders to get bigger things developed. >> That's the new strategy from millennials. Throw them in CIE training, get them up to speed. Okay I got to ask you the question, because I want Netnology, the company that you're the co-founder of, is small but you're doing a unique thing. You're taking and SIE approach, obviously Cisco DNA is in your blood, you in the Cisco family if you will, but you still got to work with other platforms like Amazon and what not, as you guys go out there is a trend towards automation and we're seeing that professional services, whether they are from global SIs, the trend is towards accelerating down the cycle of deployment, faster, faster, faster, it's almost like the old days was eight months to roll out an SAP deployment, now that's eight weeks, now is it going to be eight minutes. This is the trend, it requires automation, what is your vision on how this is going to pan out going forward because this is the beginning of a new kind of Cloud scale at a service level. What's your vision? >> So if you really see from the compute world guys they were already doing that stuff for the longest time and they always asked us, the networking people, how come if my CAPEX is 30% but my OPPEX is 70% when it comes to the networking because we were lacking all of those capabilities. And the reason was that all the vendors they had these closed systems but now with this whole trend of SDN, NFE, people want to have more control. Cisco, and a lot of the vendors, they have all opened up their APIs and given the SD case so now you have the capability to go and take this talk to the compute guys. Say you are ahead of the game but we are catching up as well. By using all of these different tools what we are using in our deployments day in and day out. So if I give you an example, recently we did a project for a customer which was a multi-vendor fabric, VXLAN fabric, for data center, and we automated that whole deployment using Ansible Tower. So the thing is that if you would have done that manually, my God it would have taken a long time but now you can do it in minutes. >> Sal, talk about the Devnet explosion, because obviously we've reported all day today it came out in the keynote, over half a million developers are on Devnet, Susie Wee who's heading up Devnet and now Devnet Create which is the Cloud version of Devnet. Those two worlds are coming together and you're seeing network guys, even old school folks, adopting Cloud Navis. A natural migration and the younger guys are going and get networking as you pointed out. Devnet's been popular, you're seeing some great demos here. You can get a free Meraki Switch if you can code a little bit, take it home with you and play with it. A lot of tools, a lot of APIs as you're talking about, this is the new software development environment. What are you guys doing with Devnet? Can you share some insight into some of the things that you're doing that's relevant? Things that you're kicking the tires on? What's up? >> So first of all, to start with, we do a lot of work with Cisco Devnet and we are so humbled and honored by that because we get to learn while we are working on a lot of cool stuff. Then we can go sell that to our customers. Just to kind of tell you tomorrow, Susie Wee is announcing Devnet's cord exchange you might have heard about. So we are among those few partners who have contributed to that cord exchange. So we have put our code for everybody go get it, play with it, like we couple of use cases we have shared on that cord exchange, free for everybody. Think about you have Cisco VNFs running on AWFs how would you use cisco Cloud Center to model and deploy that service on AWFs? Using the APIs and then in the back end we have done scripting using Python and Shell and Ansible. These sort of things. And also we have a booth over here at the Devnet zone partner village and we are demonstrating some of these demos over there as well. >> That's really the standard now, people are getting the scale up in multiple clouds then deploying. That seems to be the big trend, automation there. >> Oh yeah, because as I said, the way we are partnered with Cisco we are also partnering with AWS and GCP so we have close to 35 certifications in our team including 13 CCIs. >> You're a veteran at Cisco, obviously to work at Cisco that long it's very entrepreneurial inside so it's always kind of been there. It's still a big company even when you were there but not you're an entrepreneur. What's it like on the other side? >> Oh my god, I'm living someone's dream. I'm blessed to be afford to do this. It's an awesome time for us. Of course it's a little stressful. >> Heavy lift there huh? It's not easy right? >> Me being in the silicon valley and I wanted to kind of do this but I tell you I recently Cisco included me in the Cisco designated VIP, which is a very selected group of people and worldwide, so I'm one of those people and I wrote a blog about that and I said something in there that although I have left Cisco but I don't feel like I've left Cisco because I'm still you know- >> Extended family. >> Yeah extended family. >> So what's up for the company, what's next? What's you're mission? Are you hiring? What are you working on? Share some insight into what's next for you guys? What's on your road map? >> So it's the growing pains. It's the growing pains, we are growing, our work is expanding. We are basically hiring some good talent. But more exciting something that we are also building a platform. So hopefully in the next six months we are going to be releasing something around that as well. Because again, think about we are recently named as a top 10 SDN providers by Enterprise Networking Magazine, so we are focusing on three Cisco SDN solutions. SDI in data center, SDA in branch and campus, and SDVAN on the VAN side. Now think about that you have segmentation in all of these solutions. How you can simplify this whole thing. How you can map these different perimeters between these three different solutions. So we are working on some cool ideas and some product as well so that's something really exciting for us. >> Are you guys self funded? >> Until now we are all privately funded. >> Sal, I'll put the hard question to you. As a startup, congratulations by the way, we know all about startups, we started a startup ourselves, it's growing pains but it's fun. It's hard work but it's a whole different joy. What problem are you solving? When you look at hiring an engineer what's the tough problem that you guys are trying to tackle? If you could boil it down into, the full stack great mission, what's the hard problem that you guys are trying to solve? >> So we just want to further simplify the Cisco story. As a matter of fact, in some of these SDN NFE based environments, that's our goal. How we can further simplify it. We are small enough that we can tackle some of these things. >> So tackle the complexity, that's where your mission is? >> Yes. >> Salman, thanks for coming on The Cube. Great to meet you, great to have you here. Thanks for sharing your insight here on The Cube with us live here- >> Very good, I appreciate the opportunity. >> Yeah let's follow up, love what you do. I think the future is going to be changing the game on how professional services are built, deployed and leveraged. Certainly code sharing. Collaboration is the new competitive behavior. You don't have to beat the other guy to win, you can work together. This is the new normal. This is what's going on at Cisco Live. Here in The Cube we're bringing you all the content. Stay with us, we'll see you tomorrow for day two of coverage. Thanks for watching.