>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live US 2019, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Good morning, welcome to theCUBE's second day of coverage of Cisco Live 2019 from San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Stu Miniman, and Stu and I have a couple of guests from Cisco's Data Center Networking group with us. To my right, Thomas Scheibe, VP of Product Management and to his right, Ranga Rao, Senior Director of Product Management. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome back, Ranga. >> Thank you very much. >> Thomas, great to have you. >> Happy to be here, yeah. >> So, here we are in the DevNet Zone, this is, Ranga you were saying this is probably one of the busiest locations within all of Cisco Live. It's been jammed since this morning. >> Stu: You got the ACI Takeover going on right now. >> It is! >> Yes, yes. >> So with that said, Thomas, with ACI, application-centric infrastructure, all these changes to the network, what's going on on day two? >> It's fun, it's actually, yeah, as you say, it's a little busier. We have a good set of news coming this week and yeah, you're going to hear more but let me give a little bit of a hint here as to what we're doing. We talked about how do we extend ACI into the cloud, or, as they say, anywhere. We did this two or three months ago with AWS. We're following up with the same for Azure, as well as having extension into the IBM Cloud, so that's really really exciting, opens up a lot of capabilities not just for the networking teams, how to extend into the cloud, we also have some interesting things around how we actually can start with ACI in the cloud first for the app developers, and then come back if you want to deploy either in the cloud or on prem. So, really an extension of what is doable for the networking team, as well as actually for the app teams. >> So, any ACI, any platform, any location, any workload? Any hypervisor, any container platform you want, yeah. Flexibility, that's what this is about. So, Ranga, spoke with you earlier this year at one of your partner shows, talking about all the latest, you know, AI, cognitive learning and all of those pieces there. Partner's obviously a big piece of the ACI story here. >> Thomas: Yeah. >> Thomas was giving a little talk about some of the cloud provider, what more can you share about what's happening with how your product integrates with a vast ecosystem? >> Absolutely, when we built ACI, we sort of anticipated this moment when this crowd in the DevNet area that we are seeing, right? Like, from people shifting from a very CLI focused approach to a developer focused, and integrated solution-focused approach. So we built ACI as an open platform. We have 65 plus partners, and with new integrations coming on like every so often. Just this at Cisco Live, we are launching an integration with F5. F5 is building, has built, an app for the Cisco ACI App Center, and a whole number of tools and integrations for developers. We have essentially built integrations with Ansible, Terraform, and new Python modules, so these are all exciting new things coming at Cisco Live. >> So, when you guys talk with customers, being in product management, I know you talk to customers all the time. There's presumably a very bidirectional symbiotic relationship. When you're talking with customers, Thomas, what are some of the values that they're looking for ACI to help them deliver, especially as it relates to being able to get more value out of the data that they've got? >> Right, so there are a couple of things that are probably standing out. One is, if you turn to the networking team, it's all around network automation and segmentation. There are the two biggest things everybody's after. Particularly if you look as the data is more distributed it's become harder and harder to do those all manually. You want to automate your date one activity as well as you want to make sure you can enforce segmentation of the data lost in the cloud, and on prem, all over the place. So these are the two big ones that really every network operations team is after. And then the second piece that we see obviously more and more is, what about day two? Give me better visibility, in particular, as they say, if the data is so dissolute, get me better visibility. What is going on? And then be able to tie this back to the user, which is the application team. Is there an impact on the application or not? And so there are a lot of interesting tools that we have and we're going to demo those all here, that is available for the networking team. The other piece, really, and you asked for the values, as I said, the app team, right? What is today, if an app team is developing they're typically then handed over in production. This is where this friction happens. How long does it take to go from here to here? If I can shorten that one and just take the blueprints out of the app development process, and map it directly to the automation capability of ACI, I can shorten the cycle to deploy, and so that's a tremendous value that we do see from customers. >> Great, lots of discussion in the keynote about the ever changing architectures that are happening here. Give us the update, you know? We've been down this path for ACI for a few years now, but where are your customers at? You know, what are the new things that are causing them challenges and opportunities, Thomas? >> Yeah, I probably use instead of ever changing I would say ever expanding, but you're absolutely right, because what we saw when we started this office rollaround how do I automate my data center? How do I get a cloud experience in my data center? What we see changing, and what I find is driven by this whole app refactoring process, that customers want to deploy apps maybe in the cloud, maybe develop in the cloud and so they need an extension to their automated data center into the cloud, and so really what you see from us is an expansion of that ACI concept, to Ranga's point, we actually really didn't change. We're just extending it to container development platforms, to different cloud environments, but it's the same idea, how do I automate the end to end network reach as well as these segmentations? >> Ranga, maybe can you expand on some of the automated piece of it, even, you know, I look at one of the things that jumped out at me this week is there's some changes to the CCIE program. It's not just, okay, I've done it, and I do my test. It's, well, we understand that things are changing year to year, and therefor how I get my certification, How I keep up on these, it is going to change. Where does automation play in all of this? >> Absolutely, I mean, when you think about automation there are two key parts to it. One is the automation that happens within the fabric that the controller manages and there's a lot of that. To extend on what Thomas was saying, right, in terms of how quickly the fabric can be brought up, how quickly applications can be deployed on the fabric and so on. Beyond that, there's automation that we have built leveraging the modern devo apps and CICD tools that are very popular among the developer community. Like I said, we have built integrations with Ansible, Terraform and so on, but we have also made rich APIs available across our platform. Every piece of information that the controller or the switches have is very much accessible for developers. That's really a back breaking approach to networking where developers have access to everything and can program to the network. So I think that's where the world is going, and that's what we plan to support with automation. >> Let me comment on this, because there's an interesting piece where we did, right? We have this fabric controller called the APIC. It's actually an App posting platform as well and so where we're actually taking advantage of that, everything is code in ACI, and you can write as a partner customer, apps, right on top, and so like the F5 integration that we have done is literally an F5-written and app residing there, right? And so it's really, really really flexible to build workflows around what you want to do on any infrastructure, for customers themself, for any partner themself. >> Yeah, it's an interesting piece, cause when you think, you know, I think back at my career. How much did the network really, the network architect think about the applications? Like, oh, okay, how much throughput and sure, I need it to go from north to south to east, west. Or, oh, wait, this thing needed some extra buffer credits, but usually, you know, the business owner, application owner and the network people, they were throwing things over the wall between each other and tweaking some dials here. Now when I look around this show, it's we're talking about building applications at the core of it and it's happening together. Can you speak a little bit to some of the activities going around, and that trend? >> No, absolutely, it's actually exciting. I actually, because my background is I did programming long long time back, and it's actually- >> Back when you called it programming, not coding? >> Correct. (laughing) it was programming. It is actually exciting to see, and I can tell you over the fast four, five years, when we run these techtorials we ask, cause, like architecture and programming, how many people are interested programming? And it used to be, I dunno, 10%. Now it's literally 60 to 70% of the people in the room are saying we're using automation frameworks like Ansible, and they actually see what we're doing and the value and they want to learn more. So there's a significant shift in terms of what people expect, what they want to do as a network infrastructure, versus what it was in the past. It's just a reflection on, as I said, the agility that is needed out of the infrastructure, and how do we react to what the developers, the users, want to do that put the apps on, so. >> In the spirit of Cisco's bridge to possible which was the Barcelona theme, is this a bridge to IT and business working better together? >> Absolutely. I mean the way... I dunno whether I can say much, but it's absolutely, how do I bridge, we call it initially, how do I bridge between what you called out, the networking and application team? It's the bridge to possible. It's not like, oh, it's your problem, it's my problem. We can do it together or these two teams can do it together, absolutely. That's actually a very good reference. >> To add to that, when we were in 2012 thinking about what should ACI be, everyone in the industry was somehow thinking that all the network engineers will magically become programmers, right? So programmability is a big part of what the network needs but also being aware of the application and being able to respond to the right needs of the application at the right moment is a pretty big thing, and that's what we have built with ACI, with the first class support for programmability. >> And the programmability that we're seeing and hearing about, Ranga, how is that a differentiator for Cisco? >> So, I think, first of all, the network, we have always believed, is the nervous system of the enterprise, so a lot really interesting information goes through the network, so unlocking the value of the network for these different use cases is what's made possible with the programmability approaches that we have taken, right? The only reason why we have 65 plus partners programming to our platform, is because we have these open APIs. We have a ton of channel partners using the open APIs to build apps and to, like, support videos, different use cases for our customers, with ad hoc automation or even using some of the automation framework, so it has really, evolved the network from being CLI-centric to being solution and programmability centric. >> Maybe one point to make since he said open APIs, and I can't overemphasize this, we're truly open APIs, right? Because sometimes there's in this, not naming names, but people saying, oh, you have to be a certification to use these APIs. That is not the case for Cisco APIs on ACI. They are open. Everybody, customers, partners, quite frankly, even competitors could use those to program. We're standing behind our APIs. They can be used as-is. >> So it is quite a big change. I mean, people know historically, Cisco it's like, well, Cisco solves customer problems, and then they would drive it through the standards. Here, you know, we we've watched the ascendency of the DevNet group, and you know, hundreds of thousands of people now helping to build code. It's the API economy, so, you know, very much it's not the Cisco I thought about a generation ago. >> Thank you. You know, we take this as a compliment. We're actually really excited to see how much development is possible by opening this platform up with APIs and I think that somebody else said this, so it's not all mine, but your more APIs to have, you have user lists to integrate, the faster we jointly develop and actually achieve what we want, so that's the bridge. >> And the beautiful thing about APIs is customers and other developers learn things that we wouldn't have and we learn, and we are seeing a lot of that, so that's another way of unlocking innovation for our customers, and we are seeing a lot of that, you know? >> So when we talk with any customer, any business, we always talk about speed scale, speed to innovation. With the wave of connectivity, the expansion of 5G, WiFi six, the proliferation of mobile data that's going to be traversing the networks the next few years. It's going to be video. How is an application-centric infrastructure going to allow customers to take advantage of the demands on the network that need for speed, so that your customers can be as competitive as they need to be? >> Let me try to kind of tune down to the essence there. What really is going on, you have all these different applications, as you point out, all of these users and endpoints, and what you want to do is you want to have an ability to correlate between what the user wants to run on the infrastructure and how the infrastructure has to behave. And then also, you want to correlate back as to infrastructure issues, who is impacted? And really was ACI was about is not rebuilding applications. It was about, provide this glue, this bridge, between what's going on in the infrastructure to what the user experience is, and if I can do this it becomes so much more efficient and it's so much easier to roll out all these new applications on an ACI infrastructure. >> Exciting stuff, guys. Thomas, Ranga, thank you for joining Stu and me on theCUBE today. Lots of exciting stuff. We'll be listening for those announcements that you said are coming out later today. >> Yeah, okay. You will see them. >> All right, excellent. Thanks, guys, we appreciate your time. >> Thanks, same here, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from our second day of coverage of Cisco Live San Diego. Thanks for watching. (energetic theme music)