(gentle music) >> We all know that virtually every organization is using the cloud in some way, shape or form. But those same organizations are building or maybe buying abstraction layers that attempt to hide the underlying complexity of these clouds. Which are now connected to on-prem workloads, they're in hybrid models, spanning across multiple clouds, and bleeding out to the edge. Now, while such an approach is extensively simplifies technology, provisioning and management, it brings challenges. And these challenges are fundamentally data problems. For example, with the sprawling clouds, how do you track sensitive data and know where it lives? How do you ensure compliance and privacy protections in a world of ever-changing regulations? How can you securely share data in an increasingly decentralized environment? How can you identify gaps in security policies and how can organizations identify and stop exfiltration in this complex environment? And, oh, by the way, very importantly, how can this all be automated? Because the number one challenges that CSOs face is a lack of talent. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this CUBE conversation where we profile emerging technologies, innovative startups and disruptive trends in enterprise tech. And today we're pleased to welcome two guests from a really interesting firm trying to solve many of these problems. With us are Dr. Noah Johnson, who was the co-founder and CTO. And April Mitchell, head of engineering, both from Dasera. Folks, welcome April. Great to see you again. >> It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks, Dave. >> Okay Noah, let me start with you. I got to ask you, is security in your mind a do-over? >> Hey Dave. Thanks for having us. Great to be here. So yeah, you hear the adage a lot today, security is broken. And certainly if you look at the number of data breaches and misuses of data in the last few years, clearly something isn't working, right? Now, our view actually is that data security needs to be rethought, and kind of designed from the ground up for the modern way that the data is used. And that's exactly what we're doing. So we don't say, do over, so much as data security re-imagined, especially for the cloud. >> Yeah, you can't just rip and replace, but it's a little tongue in cheek there. But tell me more about the background of the company. Why did you and your co-founders start the firm? Are those challenges that I laid out upfront, the ones that you're directly attacking? >> Yeah, we're attacking all of them. So the background of the company, our technology originally came from PhD work that I did while I was studying at UC Berkeley. So I've spent most of the last decade or so looking at different cybersecurity problems. And my dissertation specifically focused on, how do you secure sensitive data while still allowing people to access it in a flexible way? As part of that work, I was able to collaborate with a big tech company, Fortune 500 company, who were facing very similar problems internally. They needed to get a handle on their data. And so through that kind of research collaboration, we built a platform that was able to track data and monitor how the data was used to better protect it while still allowing the company to be data-driven. They ended up deploying the system at scale. And so this was really strong, at least initial validation. The approach that we're using at Dasera actually is quite effective and sound. So since then, we've talked to hundreds of other CSOs and security teams, and really sort of gotten a deeper appreciation for the magnitude of the problem today. No person that we've spoken to has high confidence in their data security. And we can dig into the reasons for that. It's not for lack of effort, it's that this is a very hard problem, especially with the moving to the cloud. >> Yeah, I mean, trust is popping up on the NPS surveys. It's like the number one factor today. April, let's bring you into the discussion. You and I met early last decade and we've followed your career since then. What attracted you to Dasera? >> Yeah, that's a great question, Dave. I've spent my career at Fortune 10 companies with 15,000 plus employees. What made me take this step to go to all the magnitude, a smaller company and team? And I would say it was an easy choice and I was driven by a bold vision, the right team and an innovators heart. When I had a conversation with Ani, the CEO and Noah's co-founder, Ani and I crossed paths back at HP, and he had the opportunity to work with myself and one of my collaborators. And I'd say at the time we were the two co-founders running our own little two-person startup within HP labs, delivering consumer web services. And Ani and I connected then. And we knew we wanted to have that chance to work together in the future. And I was blessed with the opportunity to go from analytics, to programmability at HP at Cisco. And when Ani called me up just a little over two months ago, and he told me about Dasera, immediately I was interested. Data security is a wonderful hot space with so many challenges, and that innovation and the challenge from a real research perspective is what drew me to Dasera. And I had the conversation with Noah. And we went deep into differential privacy and the cracks of his PhD research. And I understood there, this company is built on very strong bonds. And really, to be successful, it's about the team. You have to have a diverse team with great experience. And when I talked to every single one of the team members, they shared a vision and they shared a passion. And you know me, I love being a part of a strong team and I love building strong teams. And that's exactly what we're doing here at Dasera. >> Thank you for that April. So Noah, give us the north star. Like early on, you guys got to focus in on where you're headed. What is that north star? >> Our goal is to really solve data security. You know, we touched on earlier, clearly current solutions aren't working. We think we have a very innovative solution that is designed specifically for where data lives today, which is the cloud. We see ourselves as being the kind of gold standard for tracking and managing and securing data in the cloud across the entire life cycle. You know, from the point the data is created to all of the different ways that data is used, to when the data is deleted, we want to build a system that lets companies for the first time, get that visibility, create that feedback loop between the data users, the different security stakeholders, the legal teams. Help them make better, more informed security decisions by providing that visibility. >> So April, I use this chart sometimes when I do segments on security. I think it's from Optiv and it's this, it shows all the different segments and this is a very fragmented market space. So I'm wondering, like for first of all, like who's the enemy, I mean, who you're trying to attack? But it's so fragmented, maybe there isn't one. But from an engineering standpoint, part two of the question is, what are the really gnarly problems that you're focusing on? But talk about part A first, if you would. Who are you targeting here? >> Absolutely. I would say the best defense is a really good offense. And how are we approaching this problem differently? And there are many data security tools out there. Many processes, from access control to DLP, but we still had 4,000 events, 4,000 breaches in the last year alone. So we can't continue to expect different outcomes by using these same approaches. So that's where we are changing the story. And we have a bold purpose. We don't want to be a typical existing cybersecurity company. We want to take the approach of treating data security as sacred, we want to make the world a safer place, and we want to do that by securing data across its life cycle. Creation to deletion. You asked about the gnarly challenges that are out there. To do that right, you have to do it at speed. You've got to do it in real time and you have to do it at scale. And those are definitely the challenges that we're running into right now from an engineering perspective. >> So Noah, when you looked at the landscape, you saw, as April said, it was just so many different tools out there. How do you describe your difference in the marketplace? And April, please chime in as well. >> Sure. Yeah. So everyone has a slightly different approach. April touched on this earlier. We want to fix data security. So in some sense, we're all on the same team. We have different views of the most effective way of solving this problem, but ultimately everyone wants to solve the same problem. I would say, we're the only ones that give a comprehensive look at the entire data life cycle. So if you look at other similar security offerings, a lot of players are focused on just access control, right? Or data loss prevention, or specific features like encryption. And these are all really important technologies, but they're not sufficient, right? These are technologies that have been in use for the last decade and yet we still see data breaches on a daily basis. And the reason for that is, even if you have those systems in place, there's a lot that can go wrong between when someone is granted access to all of the different ways they consume and share the data. And so where we're unique is we give this holistic picture of the data end to end. And we don't necessarily replace those other solutions. Actually, we compliment them. Our system can tell you, if you have an encryption solution in place, are you encrypting the right data, right? Are you using it the right way? So you get more value out of those tools. Or if you have access control, our platform can be a set of guard rails or kind of a backstop that can let you know, are those access control rules properly configured, are certain users over privileged, and so forth. So really providing that context, like I said earlier, to make better security decisions. That's where we're differentiated. That's kind of our unique view of how to solve the problem. >> April, anything you'd add to that? It sounds like you're a platform for all these tools. I feel like I need that for my apps. But what's the secret sauce there? >> Yeah. I think the secret sauce is that we've learned from the challenges that our customers are facing. We have an approach where we want to rapidly innovate and rapidly validate. And our team is doing that. Noah mentioned a couple of the key features. I'm going to add a few more, because really when you're making a choice, what should I use, you've got to start with, what do you want to protect? Your data and your people? How can we help you protect that? Well, we can help you manage data sprawl. You'd be surprised by how many customers on the cloud are really interested, or use our product for the first time and go, "Oh my gosh, I did not know that that was there. When did that get there? How did it get copied there? Why is it there?" You know, and they're asking these questions. So we want to help you track that sprawl of your data. We want to monitor the data when it's in use. How are people growing it? How are your employees accessing it? How are they using it? Are they using it in the right way? Are they using it in the right way today? Are they using it on the right way tomorrow based the permissions? And we can give you that risk analysis and that perspective. We also want to let you know that when the data's sprawls, when there's a new copy that's stored in the new data store, is it configured the right way? Are you protecting it the right way? We can analyze that for you as well. So really the completeness of the features from the end to end solution, you can't protect across the entire data life cycle from creation to deletion, unless you're truly connecting and understanding how the data is being used. >> Great. Thank you. Noah, what's the ideal customer look like? Big, small, different industries? Will you give us the ICP? >> So as far as industries, our view is, a data breaches is a data breach. So any company that collects data and needs to protect it would benefit from our solution. I will say specifically, organizations that are cloud first and data-driven. Meaning they collect a lot of data and need to use that data, especially if that data is sensitive. So think B to C companies, retail, e-commerce, social media, finance, any company that collects consumer data, there are legal obligations, security obligations, kind of a higher standard of care that's required for that data. And that's where we can really help. So we're seeing traction actually from all of these industries. As far as the ideal user profile, we are targeting data security professionals. But we are a platform. We are a collaboration platform. Our system is designed to let different stakeholders within the organization, work together. From the security team, to the legal team, to the different data custodians, they can all collaborate seamlessly within the platform using that context that we're stitching together about the data flow. >> That last point is important because it used to be, it was the SecOps team. It was their problem. And now it's IT, it's security, it's legal, it's the line of business. And then the first point you made about cloud first and data-driven, that's good news for your term. Because if you're not cloud first and data-driven, you're probably not going to be in business by the end of the decade. So, how about the business case? You know, your startup, the ideal startup situation is you're 10X the value at 1/10 the price. Now, maybe in your case it's a little different 'cause you're taking that holistic view as opposed to one narrow view. But what's the justification? Lay out the ROI. >> Yeah. So we've designed the platform actually to be very quick time to value and easy to deploy. The platform is fully automated, has built in policies and machine learning. So you spin it up and it will automatically discover the data stores, it will go and crawl the data to automatically classify it. And so now you've already solved the problem of just data sprawl, knowing what data is out there. And then we can show customers, here's how the databases are configured, is the data sufficiently protected, here's how employees are interacting with the data. And then finally optionally to write policies and workflows to make sure that there's a process in place to protect the data across its entire life cycle. So there's sort of an evolution of different features. So there's kind of a maturity evolution from just, number one, identifying the data, or like we say, you can't protect what you don't know exists, to protecting it and identifying whether there are any security risks and compliance gaps. And then finally automatic proactive protection and remediation by security policies. >> So where are you guys in terms of the maturity? Obviously it's early days, but where are you in terms of product market fit? Have you nailed that? Still trying to figure that out? I know you've raised around 9 million, you're out of stealth. You give us a sense of the maturity curve. >> I can jump in on that one and speak a bit about our first customers. And then Noah can add more detail as well. But we're seeing these cloud first organizations, the CSOs, the chief security or privacy officers coming to us because they know that traditional approaches aren't working. We are here, we are ready to engage. We aren't just grabbing, what's coming, we're talking about what we have now. And we will sit arm to arm with you and made sure that we are solving the challenges that your team is facing right now. And that's where we're getting early feedback. That's where we've really been able to showcase some new innovations and to validate and move from there. But I would say, if you're interested in talking to us, please call, please visit the website and make that connection. Because we're not stealth, we're not hiding. We're engaging and definitely have a offering that is ready to be used. >> So okay, so you're in market with that offering. What do I buy from you? Is it a SAS, is it a subscription, is it a service? >> Yeah, so we have a few different product offerings and deployment models, depending on where the data's stored and the environment that the company wants to run the software. So we support on-prem, we also have a SAS offering as well. >> Okay, and that runs in the cloud, obviously, the SAS offering, or you can sort of put it as in a require on appliance? How do I deploy it on on-prem? >> No appliance runs. Runs purely in the cloud. And within an hour to onboard, to connect to the environment and to get a scan up and running. >> And it's status of the company, am I right, I think you've raised like $9 million. Head count, anything you can share in that regard? Are you hiring? I'm sure you are. >> We're growing very quickly. There's been tremendous traction as April mentioned earlier, and we're super excited about the opportunity ahead of us. It's clear we've tackled the very big problem that is still unsolved. So we have big plans and we fortunately have been able to raise some capital to help us build out the team, to add the capabilities that we need to fully solve this problem end to end. So we're well on our way, but it's a journey. This is an unsolved problem for a reason, right? It's quite complex. And we've got a great headstart, we've got a great approach, we've got some great early customers, but there's a way to go still. >> And I'll use that opportunity to say, yes, we are hiring. And if you're interested in this space, if you want to learn from a team of experts, but also grow your skills and take on some new challenges, then please go to the website and check out the current positions that we have. Dropped me ping through any of the social media networks, 'cause we'd love to hear from you. >> Great. Website is Dasera, D-A-S-E-R-A. All right. So check it out. Guys. great to have you on. Thanks so much. Best of luck. We'll be tracking you, and really congratulations on getting to this point. And I know you have a lot more work to do, but really exciting times, I'm sure, for you. >> Thanks Dave. >> It's a pleasure to see you this way and hopefully in person soon. >> Hopefully. Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully in '21. We'll see. We'll see. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE, we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

(lively techno music) >> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering, DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> And welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Peter Burris and this is the last of two days of great presentations here at Cisco DevNet Create. A show set up specifically to help software developers and networking professionals start to co-mingle their ideas and look at business problems differently to create new ideas, new innovations, new inventions that can change the way the world does things so that we can improve the quality of digital business and life overall. And, I'm very excited that, our last session, we actually have a real live software engineer, here on theCUBE to talk about some of the things that are happening. And it's a very important one, 'cause it's in AppDynamics. Balwinder Kaur, nice to meet you and welcome to theCUBE >> Nice to be here. Thanks, Peter! >> So, Balwinder is a principal software engineer at AppDynamics, which is a Cisco property that came in within the last year. >> Yes. >> And has been especially important in thinking about how we're going to embed additional software controls and metrics into applications to make them more network-friendly. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, so let's start off by asking you this questions, Balwinder. You're a software engineer, you're a developer. You're at this show, first inaugural show that Cisco's put forward, what do you think of it? >> I think it's very interesting that Cisco is doing something for DevOps, for the cloud, for IoT that is not completely network-focused, so, it's great. >> Well, most of the content, as Cisco said, is coming out of the community. It's coming out of contributors, and others that are part of this process. Has there been any particular theme or message that you've seen from the community as it's kind of come together that surprised you or really resonated with you? >> Well, I definitely, Since we are very new to the Cisco family, I got a chance to meet with other companies and other parts of Cisco here. And I got a better picture of how different pieces, like Jasper and Meraki and AppDynamics together can provide a wonderful insight for the customer base and that's very valuable, whether it's insights into the networking layer, application layers. Again, within the applications, whether they're web applications, Java, .NET, or they're Android, iOS and embedded application, the Internet of Thing applications, whether they're multiple applications on one box or dedicated applications. So I think it's very exciting and the potential is just immense. >> Peter Burris: AppDynamics has been at the vanguard of thinking about this notion of network-ability of applications for quite some time. As AppDynamics has evolved and matured, and you almost had an exit that went to the public and you ended up with an exit that went to Cisco. How has the audience, the community around application development responded to AppDynamic's vision of the idea of better instrumenting applications to make them more successful on networks and have networks be more appropriate for application developers? >> So... your question was quite complicated. >> Peter Burris: True. >> (laughs) >> But hey, you got five minutes. >> I will try to answer it. So, definitely, the response with AppDynamics being part of Cisco has been positive from the customers because now there's a lot of backing from a very big company and definitely there are synergies. Cisco's big in the enterprise. AppDynamics is also big in the enterprise. And as applications become more and more of the business, definitely the customers like that part. And I don't know how closely you've been following what AppDynamics does, but we've gone from just application monitoring into business IQ, different parts of your business and providing more and more intelligence to our customers, so I think it's a good place and a good time to be. >> We like to say that digital business is really how you use your data. The difference between business and digital business is the idea that data is an asset and can be applied differentially to greater serve customers. And the trend to add new digital capabilities to business means that software and data are getting embedded deeper and deeper and deeper into business pieces. Both as process, for analytics and a number of other things. And it sounds as though AppDynamics, and this is for that core sort of enterprise customers, are also being embedded more deeply in the business as software takes on more responsibility for the core and differentiating capabilities that a business performs. Is that accurate? >> That's definitely one way of putting it. We like to say, at AppDynamics, that the application is becoming the business. So we have application-focused and more and more businesses are moving into the applications space and so IT organizations are not a support function, but getting to be more of the core function. So yes, it's two ways of representing, probably, what is very close. >> Peter Burris: So as you move from monitoring to monitoring and analytics for crucial software applications, what new approaches or what new insights is your customer base gaining about how best to set up these capture points and how to use the data associated with application performance? >> So, there's different paths of the application, right? And application architectures are changing, so you need to have solutions that can cater to all of them, for example microservices is a big trend now. Containers like Docker, and so you need your monitoring solutions to be able to cater to all of that. The other piece is the depth of instrumentation, so not just in the application layer; your database, your network monitoring. So the complete suite of all of this. And then, not isolated, right? Being able to correlate all the data. And that's sort of within the data center, but the outside world we call the end-user monitoring. We have browser and Android and iOS, but we're also building solutions now for the Internet of Things, which is basically traditionally connected embedded devices, but now they're talking to cloud services. And so, definitely a lot of these things are now very developer-centric. So just like Cisco has this conference geared toward developers, yes, we definitely understand that embedded systems, they need more and more developer-centric features where they have control of what performance data to pick up, what business data to pick up, when to send the data. And so, yeah, just having the wide, rich variety of support for different platforms, different form factors and different languages also, right? And then being able to all view it in a single pane, I think that's the strength of AppDynamics. >> Peter Burris: But you also need more developers, because there's going to have to be an enormous amount of software to bring all these devices, these IoT events, and everything else we're talking about when we think about digital business in under the umbrella of an AppDynamics or related type of technology. So, bringing new developers in and having them be familiar with the value that these kind of tools can bring to the party is crucial. How is AppDynamics looking at the challenges of attracting whole new classes of application developers into the fold so that you can, in fact, have greater end-to-end visibility about how applications are performing and behaving? >> Balwinder Kaur: So, we have dedicated teams now, which are looking at increasing developer mindshare and catering to them. Also, there's, especially in this whole Internet of Things, it's a very well-understood fact around the industry that you don't have as many embedded engineers to build all the applications and that's why there is all the platforms are now coming with more support for JavaScript developers, Java, which nobody used to think could run heavily on embedded devices. It's a big player. Python, Javascript. And so, I think catering, using embedded engineers to build tools so that the web application developers can write applications that turn on embedded devices is the trend and we recognize it and absolutely support all those developers. >> Peter Burris: So time is crucial, especially at the edge, where you have to be able to ... Often an event has to happen within a certain, prescribed period of time and the round-trip can be challenging. So, what is the role that monitoring, and metering, well not so much metering, but monitoring and event-management plays as we start to deploy these more complex applications, especially IoT-like applications? >> So, I just finished the talk here, recently. And basically, at design time, just you know how they say that security has to be built in at design time? Similarly, all solutions that get deployed now need to be built in with hooks for performance-monitoring, right? If your devices are now talking to the cloud, you need to be able to know that when your hundreds and thousands of devices are there, which one of them's are suffering from a network latency problem and which ones are not. And that is where AppDynamics comes in. You put the agents there, they correlate back and they correlate to all different parts of your businesses, whether the traffic is originating from a mobile device, a browser, or it's originating from an embedded device. And I think that's performance monitoring is absolutely crucial. It's not a luxury to have any more, it is a must-have and I think, as more and more solutions get deployed into the field, the realization will be there. I think right now, people are still in the IoT world, still focused more on other problems, like security, interoperability, connectivity. But this will become a growing pain once some of the other hurdles have been bypassed. >> Well, what are some of those lessons that you learn about how you appropriately embed performance-management and monitoring hooks into applications? Where should people be looking? >> So, if you're looking at the embedded side, then people should look at definitely small footprints. Agents should be configurable. Because different devices and use cases have different expectations. Some of the devices, they only want the performance data to be sent when they are done with whatever they are designed to do. Others don't want the battery to be up, so they want the performance data to be sent when they are powered up, not in deep-sleep mode. Then again, off-line mode also varies from application to application. There are some devices that go offline for up to weeks. And they just want to store local data and upload it later on. There are others that can not store more than one hour. So basically, you are looking for agents that are configurable. The developer can control when they want to send data, when do they want to store data, how much they want to store data. Then at the back end, you should be able to correlate all this. Because in isolation, it doesn't give you the problem. There is a lot of complexity on the end-user side as well as there's a lot of complexity on the web application side, right? There are micro services, Docker containers. So any solution that provides end-to-end monitoring and then is able to correlate data across different pieces to be able to give a true picture of performance is a good solution to have. >> So we want to make sure that the agent isn't forcing particular behaviors, but is in fact responsive and fits within the environmental constraints and considerations of whatever it is that that local device does. >> Balwinder Kaur: Yes. So, you're looking for a lot of flexibility on the embedded side. There are other where auto-instrumentation and ease of use, and not necessarily development time is important. There are other factors there, but for the Internet of Things side, this is what is important. >> So as we think about increasing, as we think about the evolution over the next few years of software, to what degree does the ability to re-use software get tied back to having visibility in how software performs? Being able to move from one cloud supplier to another, have depend upon, having greater visibility into how software performs. The ability to reapply software to new roles or purposes that weren't originally anticipated, dependent upon knowing how that software performs. It seems as though an AppDynamics tool is going to have a much greater set of propositions over the course of software as opposed to just at design time. Would you agree with that? >> Yes, absolutely, right? Because, so multi-cloud is definitely one. You want to be able to see your performance data, how your business is performing, right? Because your business is the application, how is it performing as solutions move across different clouds or performance of the different cloud change. So there're already conversations about multi-cloud for sure. And then, yes, absolutely, developers getting real-time feedback of their new deployments. Did it impact the performance or not? Yes, those are going to be very important trends. >> So, we've talked a lot over the past few days about DevOps and the role that DevOps is likely to play in digital business as well as within the way the entry is evolving. Can you just relate the role that AppDynamics and, again, this class of tools has to facilitating, collaboration, and communication, and working relationships between operations and development people? >> So, we already internally, we have applications, because we had a SAS solution tool. And so we are very acutely aware of, we have to keep our systems up as well. And we are acutely aware of how, when we develop and deploy new solutions, what does it mean? How the performance can be monitored and that's a trend that definitely we are keeping an eye on. But is there something to suggest that we have tools right now? I don't think that is something that we can ta-- >> But can the data be used by both parties? Does application performance data, can it be a lingua franca? For both operations and developers-- >> Absolutely. >> As they think about making sure that, operations people saying, "This is what works." And application developer saying, "This is what I need." That data can kind of start bringing them together and giving them a common thing to talk about. >> Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, right? >> Well, so, one last question here. This is the first, the inaugural Cisco DevNet Create. What do you think? You looking forward to future DevNet Creates? >> Absolutely. >> And what would you like to see coming out of this show as a consumer of the information, not as a presenter? But what would you like to see more of as these communities start to co-mingle and cross-pollinate ideas? >> I think some of the things that is a friction and will stay a friction until the embedded and operations teams come closer with the IT teams. And so I think best practices from both sides; being able to know what best practices are and then brainstorming and coming up with things that work for everybody is one. And maybe put people in each other's shoes, right? Like IT Ops doesn't always understand everything about what happens on the OT side and vice versa, so you know, like putting them in a situation where they get better hands-on, like a lab, right? Where they have better hands-on experience and now I understand what they are dealing with, right? Like, the people that have never been inside a NOC and they now can sit there and experience some of that. >> Which is not the most fun thing in the world to do. (laughs) >> Yeah, so then we need to make it more fun, right? >> (laughs) Yes. A NOC as World of Warcraft. >> (laughs) >> Alright, so, Balwinder Kaur, thank you very much. >> Thanks, Peter. >> Balwinder Kaur is the principal software engineer, or a principle software engineer at AppDynamics. And this is it, guys. Two days of Cisco DevNet Create. It's been a very successful conference. We've talked about some fascinating things. A lot of sessions on talking about DevOps. A lot of sessions on multi-cloud and the role that software's going to play inside businesses, digital business transform. This has been theCUBE. More of this in upcoming shows. Thank you very much for watching us over the course of the past couple days. For John Furrier, Peter Burris. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy...

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube covering DevNet Create 2017 brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back here, we're live here in San Francisco for SiliconANGLE's the Cube's exclusive 2 days of coverage for Cisco's inaugural event DevNet Create, building on their 3 year old successful DevNet program which is Cisco core developer program now foraying out into the world of cloud native developers, open source, great move for Cisco. Our next guest, Wissam Ali-Ahmad, lead solutions architect with Splunk. Good to see you. >> Good to see you too, John. >> Here with Peter Burris of course, my co-host. >> Wissam: Hi, Peter. >> So Splunk being here is an important thing because you guys have been riding the wave for cloud, certainly your relationship with Amazon web service is well known, very successful. Splunk as a company went public, well known. You guys really, really hit a niche around big data and how cloud has helped you guys accelerate your business. So you've been transformed, but continuing to grow, so you're riding that wave, but now Cisco's on the wave, and Cisco's been involved in the wave. But from a relationship standpoint, oh yeah, we're the networking guys, we're going to come in and help Docker with this, we're going to come in and help Splunk with this, so they've been kind of a helper, not the main player. This is a new way to get back in and be really enabled for the cloud world. What's your reaction to this move by Cisco? >> I mean, we have a great partnership with Cisco for many years. And I think, you know, Splunk plays a good, as you said, we're a good player there. We integrate well. I mean, all the initiatives Cisco's involved with, we have integrations with Cisco on many levels with different technology. And also Splunk, the deal is with Splunk is that you need to bring invisibly to everything, and Splunk is that platform where you have access to all that data throughout all, all is like all that machine data so you have access to all that data, not only application data, not only network data. You need to look at everything these days. Especially when there's attacks. You know we heard recently, of course everybody heard about WannaCry, and to the tech, that attack, you need to look at everything, because you could someone bring in a laptop behind the firewall even, and they can be affected already, and if you don't have access to see what they're doing, not just from a network perspective, like what apps in the cloud they're accessing, you know, what other files on the locally, so, because you have access to all that data in Splunk, you should be able to get better visibility. >> And you guys have a unique position in the sense that you're close, again, to the machine. You know, logs and data We had Amanda on from Cisco, who was, in her tribe as a developer, she's not necessarily a network engineer, but she's brought on that mojo in from the developer community. When she was first day on the job, you know, they were doing some Python, some rest API stuff, you know, basic 101 stuff, but she didn't want to do an app that was showing hey, how many Twitter followers do I have? She had to go in and look at the devices. So now the opportunity with IOT is that for Cisco to make and expose the network for programmability >> Wissam: Right. >> And extend it. How are they going to do that? I mean you're closer to those guys in your relationship, but that's what everyone wants. They want the infrastructure to just go, that's DevOps >> Right. Yeah, they want the edge to come to them. They want data to be more accessible to all the users. And then so Cisco's on that path, definitely on that path, to get more infrastructure visibility in the data center and the networks, so they're definitely on that path of doing that. >> And let me build on this, so if we think about the various components associated with some of the things that Splunk does. A leader in the application of machine and AI and big data related technologies, to solving business problems. The algorithms for doing this have been around for a long time. The hardware couldn't do it, so you had to write really tight software to do it, and you were one of the first companies out there to really do that. And then it was, we'll point all that at sources of data, that you can apply these technologies, to create better business value. And there were two places where people did it. Web logs, for online marketing, and IT, since IT technology throws off an enormous amount of data. So as I think about it, the relationship with Cisco is especially interesting, because Cisco is going to be one of those companies that encourages people to create new sources of data and a lot of it, IOT and other places, and bring it back to companies and technologies that have a proven track record for generating value out of that data. So talk a bit about how Splunk intends to, going back to what John said, riding that wave. The algorithms are here, the hardware can do it, now we've got to get access to more of the data, and here comes Cisco being really serious about moving a lot of data around. What do you think? >> I mean, we like when people bring in a lot of data into Splunk. We also have been focusing a lot on the personas. On the, we call the Sherlock, the data Sherlock. Right, so that unique persona is where they need to look at, how do I make sense of my data? Not only just about bringing data, but how do I make sense of that data. What are solutions? What are use case I need to have better impact on the business? So we're actually helping solve real kind of business use cases. This morning, Yelp had a webinar about how they use Splunk driving all the web infrastructure for Yelp, the Yelp back end for all their-- >> Peter: This is still in the IT? >> Yeah. >> Peter: It's not Yelps marketing group, this is still in the IT? >> But they are correlating that with other business use cases, yes. >> Of course, it will start coming together. So where do you see some of these use cases popping up, now that Cisco is helping to create those new sources, and get people to, you know, acculturating people to the idea that these are sources of value, business value. Where do you see some of the new use cases? >> There's a lot of use cases now coming up around business analytics, around IOT as you mentioned. And an added element of machine learning across different data sources. So if I want to look at not just performance of one service, let's say my elevator, I want to see how that's going to affect other areas of my business, too. So you're able to see not only the power of correlating that data, but also be able to apply machine learning on that data. So there's a lot of use cases around business analytics. Security's always there, because security, as you know, attack vectors are getting complex every few months or so, so you need to also chase that, and you need to look at all the data, the behaviors in that data, to get better predictability, to get better prevention detection. >> So Splunk is emerging as a great software company for a lot of IT pros, but it still is more in the op side. How is this conference and the likelihood or the notion that developers are increasingly going to be part of that use case, it's utilizing data and data-related services to better understand operations, but find new ways of creating value out of the capabilities provided by that. What's the developer angle here for Splunk? >> Great question. We actually are focusing a lot on developer tools. So Splunk, being a platform. I always say Splunk is a full-feature platform for machine data and big data. So it's open in the sense that developers can develop their own content on Splunk. They can extend what we have. So an example of that is, the recent project called Mexico Contaro. So that's a project full that's looking at internet usage and coverage on Mexico, in Mexico City and across all the cities. And this was using Splunk to end Meraki API's, and bring all that data together, and network data to try to give exposure to kind of like government analytics. And that's a neat case because not necessarily only IT, but also helping all the goods out there. >> So Cisco, Meraki and other sources, plus Splunk to be able to get deep visibility into a number of ways, you know, a very complex system like Mexico City, which is about as complex as you get, actually operates. >> Wissam: Yes. That's one, yeah. >> Tell about the Splunk direction now, because everyone's been questioning about the public offering, because you're not putting numbers out there, active community, it's not that you guys aren't being transparent, but you've got to go to the next level of growth. Obviously Cisco's coming at the cloud native world. We see the cloud native compute foundation, really with great support of the Linux foundation. New open source stuff's going on all the time. How is Splunk looking at the future right now? What's next? I mean obviously security, we heard that at Dot Conf last year, but you guys have really a good position with the data. You have good account names. You've got great blue chip customers. What's next? What's the product solution look like for you guys? What's the new architecture? What's the new plan? >> I think more listening, looking at all the scale, and cloud and listen to the customers, making the data onboarding easier, making it more scalable, covering more use cases that we talked about. Innovate a lot of areas around machine learning, all that to cover more of the use cases, so we're definitely moving forward to go the next step beyond just-- >> So let's take another example. So DevOps, right, everyone loves the DevOps. It's not like a solution, you can't buy DevOps, you just got to do it, right? So that's pretty clear. You can't just write an Agile manifesto and say, "We're DevOps." You got to have a vision, maybe write a manifesto just to get the people motivated, but put the right people in place, let the things organically develop. So the question is, what is an ideal architecture, and what is a best practice, from your standpoint, where you've seen examples of people who've transformed into this DevOps world, where they really got the ball rolling, got some change happening, and then scaled it. Can you give us a kind of a pattern that you've seen the customers? >> I have not seen personally a lot of that, but definitely there's transformation happening. It's not easy to move into that DevOps switch. You cannot do it overnight. So you need as much as possible tools that would actually give exposure, how am I doing, right? Am I pushing my code at the speed it's expected to be? Do I have bugs addressed early on? So that kind of exposure you need a system that will give you basically to analyze all that data too, and then at Splunk we have a story on DevOps. DevOps and application exposure monitoring and that. And the unique thing about Splunk is that you don't only look at what's inside the application, which was AMP's that do application management, but you should look at everything, so we look outside the black box. Not inside the app, but look at outside too, so we're going to give you exposure of your whole DevOp process You know, from the beginning, the whole condis integration, so I see Splunk helping organizations moving into that kind of new process. >> But there's an interesting relationship between tools and process, or tools and skills, so John, you'll probably laugh at this. Many years ago I found myself sitting in a room with the CEO of a very, very large pharmaceutical, me and a group of other other consultants, and he said, the discussion was, are we going to buy SAP or not? And after two hours of people arguing about it, he finally said, "Screw it, we're doing it, "I'm sick and tired of these process arguments. "We're just going to do what SAP says in the process." There's a relationship between the practices suggested by Splunk and the types of things that a business actually does in a DevOps sense. What is this, how is Splunk changing the notion of DevOps, and how is now as Splunk extends itself, how is DevOps and new practices and new ways of thinking, altering the way that Splunk delivers capability? >> I mean, we always listen to our customers. And then we've actually been looking at addressing use cases, like on DevOps, from a persona aspect. Like as a DevOp engineer, I won't be able to address this kind of issues, and we listen to that, and we try to address those, not only just by a tool, but also by looking at best practices around that. And sometimes we manifest those through apps. So Splunk can actually, you can publish an app as a developer if you're not happy as a customer, you can modify, take one of our existing free apps, and then modify them cue on process, so we're not kind of specific rigid to certain way, and I know DevOps, and Agile Ward, is not even like a religion, you know, you're not supposed to follow, you're supposed to be flexible in certain areas, and even implementing DevOps comes in Agile way too. >> But it's still pedagogical, and John in many respects, there's your manifesto for DevOps, right? Is your choice of tools and how they come together, and degree to which they're integrated kind of take priority. >> Well, you got eight minutes until you have to go up on stage and do your talk. Here we're live in San Francisco. What are you going to be speaking about when you hit the stage in eight minutes? You have seven minutes to explain (laughs). >> (Laughs) Deliver pitch. So I'll be focusing a lot on the integrations that we have with various Cisco products, so we have, with Splunk you're able to bring in a lot of the API, data through API integrations, so I'm going to show how easy that process is to bring that data if you have an API like Meraki or ACI or Ice. And I'll also be focusing more on how the data you can do it from the cloud, easy, without having an agent involved, without having any software you need to install to collect the data, and we'll be talking more about the Mexico Contaro case, and then do some fun live demos also. >> But Cisco's got good API's, people might not know that, but they are API'd up pretty well on the equipment and the gear and the platform. >> Yes, of course. >> Just commentary on that, your reaction to share for people who are not fluent in Cisco, in terms of their enablement of getting data out? >> Yes, Cisco has a lot of good API's, capabilities around sharing that data, the openness of it has been great, and made easy for us, even for our customers to bring that data, the API, that data into Splunk, so it's a matter of a few minutes now to point to that API and bring that data into Splunk, and yeah, that's good. >> Wissam Ali-Ahmad, going on stage in seven minutes, you got it all done, congratulations. Thanks for coming on The Cube. I know you've got your big speech here to the packed house. Inaugural event here, Cisco's DevNet Create. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you, John. >> More live coverage here in San Fransciso. This is The Cube, I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Peter Burris. Stay with us as we get down to wrapping up day two. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior directory of strategy and plan

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. (upbeat techno music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage here in San Francisco for Cisco Systems' inaugural DevNet Create event. I'm John Furrier sitting with my co-host Peter Burris, Head of Research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jose Bogarin, Chief Innovation Officer, Altus Consulting, VIP here at Cisco DevNet Create. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So tell your story, you have a really special story of true transformation, where DevNet and being a developer in this new world order has changed things for you. >> Yeah, actually people from Cisco call it a rags to riches story. Basically I founded my company 10 years ago with my brother and a friend. And business was going good, but we were having some trouble competing with the larger Cisco partners in Costa Rica. So that's why we decided to do something else and software was the way to go. So three years ago I had the opportunity participate in the first DevNet Zone in Cisco Live in San Francisco in 2014. And that really was a turning point for my company because we actually shifted our focus to the software and software development and that really pushed us forward and really allowed us to compete with those big partners, but also expand our business to some other parts of Latin America. So now we're doing stuff also in Mexico, and doing stuff in Peru, and even thinking about coming to the States and doing some software developing here. >> You're like, taking over the world. So take us through specifically the inflection point. Obviously DevNet, you had an internal compass, you felt that, kind of the tailwind of the marketplace pretty, not obvious to everyone, but you guys saw it. What was the moment where you go wow, we're on to something with this? >> Yeah, it's probably hard to say because it's less, like, different moments. The first one I think is reading Andreessen Horowitz, >> Peter: Andreessen Horowitz? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Peter: The Venture capitalist. >> Yeah reading their blog post about softwares in the world. So that was a blog post in 2011 I think. But we read about it in maybe 2013. And we started thinking, hey, maybe the way to go is actually to do some software by ourselves and figure out if we can actually improve the Cisco solutions that we are selling right now using software. So, we basically used that and then we came to the San Francisco 2014 DevNet Zone and said, hey, now Cisco has a program around this, so maybe yeah, software is the way to go. Maybe software is the way to actually go ahead and innovate, and do some other stuff to better serve our customers. So that's when we actually went back home and doubled down around on our strategy. And started developing more software, and having more conversations with our clients that we were able to solve using Cisco technology and Cisco hardware, but also develop software around it. >> Why did customers resonate with your story? Was it because you had a unique differentiator? What specifically did you do with Cisco that made it such a high impact value proposition? >> Okay, one of the things that I really like about Cisco is they have a very robust infrastructure, but it's sometimes, or you need special integrations to really solve a business need for a customer. So a lot of customers that we had, really had maybe the hardware or the platform, for example the Cisco Contact Center, but there's a gap between having the infrastructure and really solving that business need. So when we got there and told them, hey, maybe we can have those skills, or we are building those skills in our company to bridge that gap, that really made the difference with our customers. And that's our whole business in past three or four years has really been about that basically. >> And so it gave you an opportunity to get into that market and just have good products, great! What was the biggest learnings that you've had over that journey? What's the learnings you could share with folks watching? >> Okay, the first of all that it's a complete shift in your company. If you've been selling hardware, and now developing software. It's two different worlds completely. I don't want to say it's easier to sell hardware, but it's maybe more complicated to develop software. It has to be a whole different process because when you are selling hardware, you're basically doing the design and then just buying the hardware from Cisco and then selling it to your customer. But when you're developing software you have to have your team ready, develop probably three, four, five months, or even six months in advance. And then get that solution to the customer. So it takes a while and you have to change all your business, you have to change your practice. It's difficult. I know that a lot of partners are trying to move in that way and develop more software, but to be honest it's not that easy. You have to have a lot of commitment from management to actually make it. >> But I presume you're developing software not just for the hardware in terms of management, or something like that. Are you also looking at WebEx, and TelePresence, and the full suite of Cisco products as you start thinking about how you're developing solutions for your customers? Is that kind of the direction you're taking? Obviously on top of the hardware. Is that kind of the direction you're taking? >> Yeah, we actually started more around Contact Center and then mainly around collaboration so, WebEx presence and now even Cisco Spark. That was our focus for the first maybe three years and now we're starting to do stuff around networking, like traditional networking like routers, switching, or stuff like AP Key M or CMX for the wireless part, or even Meraki gear. So we started in collaboration but now we're expanding our business to other parts within the Cisco portfolio. >> As you think about this message of how the network, which has now become programmable, so in other words you can use software to define and reconfigure, rapidly reconfigure the network, are you also then seeing yourselves working not just with the traditional network people within the companies you're selling to, but also developers in showing how the network is offering a more superior, or extending the quality of the target that they're writing to as they write software? >> Yeah, and it's quite interesting. And coming from that Contact Center side, our conversations moved from IT to the supervisors and teams supervising the Contact Center, and now going to networking we'll probably have to move the conversations from the operations team now to the development team. So when you start developing software you actually have to go to the line of business, or to teams different from that operational team that you used to talk to. >> I was going to say, that's probably one of the reasons why it becomes more complex. That the change management challenges, and a partner has to fit into those for installing a new switch, or installing a new router is one thing. But the change management practices of going in and evolving the way a Contact Center operates, and I know Costa Rica is one of the places where, at least here in the US, it serves Spanish speaking communities here in the US. That's a pretty significant challenge. There's a lot of change management things that have to happen there. To be dragged into those is not a trivial exercise, but it also points up the need for more intelligent, higher-rope, more easy to manage, more robust types of networking interfaces. Where do you see the network going as a resource for developers to hit? >> I can say that it has to become easier to program the network because right now you have a lot of technologies, but they're still not there yet. You still need a lot of network background to actually use them, and some of them are not very flexible. So those technologies need to evolve for the developers to actually use them. And I see that coming in the next few years and Cisco's made a lot of progress in that. And also what we're seeing it's that need to improve the analytics and information that you can get from the network. And again Cisco, for example, has made a lot of progress in that. >> John: Well, AppDynamics. >> Exactly. With things like AppDynamics, or for example, APIs like Data in Motion, or the whole thought computing process that they have and that needs to improve for the developers to actually start getting more use out of it. >> What's next for you now that you see DevNet Create? They're puttin' their toe in the water, doing a good job here. First inaugural event. Does this have legs, this event? Yeah, yeah, I've seen it. I wasn't there during first DevNet Zone in 2014 and I've seen the growth from 2014 to 2015 in San Diego, and then Vegas, and then Vegas this year. So I've seen that grow in the DevNet Zone. I'm completely confident that the DevNet Create is going to get bigger and bigger in the coming years because I've seen how other teams, networking teams, operational teams, like people from Data Center, traditional like computer teams, they're starting to get more interested in software development and events like this. >> So based on your first signals of the first year of DevNet, which you walked in and transformed your business, you feel a similar vibe here? >> Oh yeah, yeah, totally, yeah, completely. You get that vibe of people learning, people start to say hey, Cisco's really actually sponsoring this and is actually putting their money where their mouth is. They're actually investing-- >> And the content's good. That's to me, the tell is the content. >> Peter: It's called walkin' the walk. >> Yeah, exactly, they're really, really helping the developers and you can see that. >> Well, let's hope that it translates to the core of Cisco because it's a huge company. The network engineers in the past, their diversion of developer was using Voice-over-IP. Those worlds are over, not over, but they're subsumed by cloud, right. Cloud is changing everything. So what are you most excited about right now as an entrepreneur, recovered, you're back on your way, rags to riches, talk of the town. As you look out on the horizon, the 20 mile stare. What are you excited about that are enabling you to go out and do what you're doing, what technologies? >> Yeah, well probably I know that some of them it's like buzz words, like IoT and cloud and machine learning and even blockchain. But actually having those technologies at hand, and it's not like you have to choose every one of them but actually use them, some of them, to actually build a better product or better service to your customers. It's something that really excites me. And again, it's something that Cisco's really investing in. So getting that traditional Cisco mold, it's like networking or Contact Center and actually improve those technologies with machine learning or some IoT technology, I think that's the way forward. And we're actually doubling down our investment in those technologies. >> Jose, thanks so much for coming on CUBE, sharing your story, I really appreciate it. Congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> Peter: And you've got to get us down to Costa Rica. >> Sure, anytime. >> We've got to get down there. Half of Palo Alto goes down there, so we might as well Peter. (laughing) Seriously, thanks for coming on, great to have you. It's theCUBE live coverage in San Francisco for Cisco's inaugural event, DevNet Create. Building on the popular, only three year old DevNet program. I'm John Furrier, with Peter Burris with theCUBE. Stay tuned for more live coverage. Stay with us after this short break. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy and Plan.

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco it's The Cube. Covering Devnet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone. Live in San Francisco this is The Cube's exclusive coverage of Cisco Systems inaugural DevNet Create event an augmentation, extension and build upon their successful three year old DevNet Developer Program. Our next guest is Amanda Whaley who's the director of development experience at Cisco DevNet. Congratulations Amanda on one DevNet being successful for three years and now your foray into DevNet Create which is some call it the hoodie crowd, the cloud native developers, open source, completely different animal but important. >> Yes. >> From DevNet. >> Absolutely so the hoodie crowd is more my tribe that's my background is from software development and I came to Cisco because I was intrigued when they reached out and said we want to start a developer community, we want to start a developer program. I talked to Suzie Wee for a long time about it and what was interesting to me was there were new problems to solve in developer experience. So we know how to do rest APIs, there's a lot of best practices around how you make those easy for developers to use. How you make very consumable and developer friendly and there's a lot of work to do there but we do know how to do that. When you start adding in hardware so IOT, network devices, infrastructure, collaboration, video, there's a lot of new interesting developer experience problems to solve. So I was really intrigued to join Cisco bringing my software developer background and coming from more the web and startup world, coming into Cisco and trying to tackle what's this new connection of hardware plus software and how do we do the right developer experience around... >> Okay so I have to ask you what was your story, take us through the day in the life as you enter in to Cisco, you have Suzie wooed you in you got into the tractor beam 'cause she's brilliant she's awesome and then you go woah I'm in Cisco. >> Amanda: Yeah! >> You're looking around what was the reaction? >> So what was interesting was so DevNet started three years ago at Cisco live we had our first DevNet developer zone within Cisco Live. That was actually my first day at Cisco so my first day at Cisco. >> Peter: Baptism by fire. >> Yes absolutely and so that was my first day at Cisco and Suzie talked to me and she said hey there's a lot of network engineers that want to learn how to code and they want to learn about rest APIs. Could you do like a coding 101 and start to teach them about that so literally my first day at Cisco I was teaching this class on what's a rest API, how do you make the call, how do you learn about that and then how do you write some Python to do that? And I thought is anyone interested in this that's here? And I had this room packed with network engineers which I at that time I mean I knew some networking but definitely nothing compared to the CCIEs that were in the audience. >> John: Hardcore plumber networking guys. >> Yeah very very yeah. And so I taught the course and it just like caught on like wildfire they were so excited about because they saw this is actually pretty accessible and easy to do and one thing that stood out was we made our first rest call from Python and instead of getting your twitter followers or something like that it retrieved a list of network devices. You got IP addresses back and so it related to their world and so I think it was very fortunate that I had that on my first day 'cause I had an instant connection to what that community... >> They're like who is she's awesome come on! >> Co-Ost: Gimme that code! >> You're like ready to go for a walk around the block now come on kindergartners come on out. No but these network guys they're smart >> Really smart. so they can learn I mean it's not like they're wet behind the ears in terms smarts it's just new language for them. >> And that was the point of the class was like you guys are super smart you know all of this you just need some help getting tarted on this tooling. And so many of them I keep up with them on Twitter and other places and they have taken it so far beyond and they just needed that start and they were off to the races. So that's been really interesting and then the other piece of it has been working in our more app developer technologies as developer experience for DevNet I get to work across collaboration, IOT, Networking, data center like the whole spectrum of Cisco technologies. So on the other side in application we have Cisco Spark they have javascript SDKs and it's very developer friendly and so that is kind of going back to my developer tribe and bringing them in and saying to you want to sell to the enterprise, do you want to work with the enterprise, Cisco's got a lot to offer and there's a lot of interesting things to do there. >> Yeah a lot of them have Cisco networks and gear all around the place so it's important. Now talk about machine learning and AI the hottest trend on the planet right now in your tribe and in developer tribe a lot of machine learning going on and machine learning's been around data center, networking guys it's not new to them either so that's an interesting convergence point. IOT as a network device. >> Amanda: Right right. >> So you got IOT you got AI and machine learning booming, this seems like it's a perfect storm for the melting pot of... >> It really is so today in my keynote I talked a little bit about first of all why have I always liked working with the APIs and doing these integrations and I've always thought that it's what I like about it is the possibility you have a defined set of tools or Legos and then you can build them into whatever interesting thing you want to and I would say right now developers have a really interesting set of Legos, a new set of Legos because with sensors, whether that's an IOT sensor or a phone or a video camera or a piece of a switch in your data center a lot of those you can get information from them. So whatever kind of sensor it is plus easy connectivity and kind of connectivity everywhere plus could computing plus data equals like magic because now you can do now machine learning finally has enough data to do the real thing. My original background was chemical engineering and I actually did predictive model control and we did machine learning on it but we didn't have quite enough data. We couldn't store quite enough of it, we didn't have enough connectivity we couldn't really get there. And now it's like all of my grad school dreams are coming true and you can do all these amazing things that seemed possible then and so I think that's what DevNet Create has been about to me is getting the infrastructure, the engineers, the app developers together with the machine learning community and saying like now's the time there's a lot of interesting things we can build. >> And magic can come out of that. >> Magic yeah right! >> And you think about it that's chemical reaction. The chemistry of bringing multiple things together and there's experimentation sometimes it might blow up. >> Amanda: Hopefully not! >> Innovation you know has is about experimentation and Andy Jassy at Amazon web services I mean I've talked to him multiple times and him and Jeff Bezos consistently talk about do experiments try things and I think that is the ethos. >> It is and that is particularly our ethos in DevNet in fact in DevNet Create an experiment right a new conference let's get people together and start this conversation and see how it comes together. >> What's your reaction to the show here? The vibe your feeling? Feedback your getting? Observations. >> I'm so happy it's been great. I had someone tell mt today that this was the most welcome they had felt at any developer conference that they'd been to and I took that as a huge complement that they felt very comfortable, they liked the conversations they were having they were learning lots of new information so I think that's been good and then I think exactly that mix of infrastructure plus app developer that we were trying to put together is absolutely happening. I see it in the sessions I see it in the birds of a feather and there's a lot of good conversations happening around that. >> Question for you that we get all the time and it comes up on crowd chat I'd like to ask you the question just get your reaction to is what misperception of devops is out there that you would like to correct? If there could be one and you say you know it's not that what's your... >> The one that seems the most prevalent to me and I think it's starting to get some attention but it's still out there is that devops is just about about the tools. Like just pick the right devops tools. Docker docker docker or use puppet and chef and you're good you're devopsing and it's like that is not the case right? It's really a lot more about the culture and the way the teams work together so if there was anything I could, and the people right, so it's flipping the emphasis from what's the devops tool that you're using to how are you building the right culture and structure of people? That's the one I would correct. >> Suzie was on yesterday and Peter and Suzie had a little bit of a bonding moment because they recognize each other from previous lives HP and his old job and it brought up a conversation around what Peter also did at his old job at Metagroup where he talked about this notion of an infrastructure engineer and what's interesting. >> Peter: Infrastructure developer. >> I mean infrastructure developer sorry. That was normally like a network engineer. So the network engineer's now on the engineering side meeting with developers almost like there seems I can't put my finger on it just like I can feel it my knee weather patterns coming over that a new developer is emerging. And we've talked a little bit about it last night about this what is a full stack developer it doesn't stop at the database it can go all the way down to the network so you're starting to see the view a little bit of a new kind of developer. Kind of like when data science emerged from not being an analyst but to being an algorithms specialist meets data person. >> Right I think it's interesting and this shows up in a lot of different places. When I think about devops I think about this spectrum of the teams working and there's the infrastructure teams who are working on the most deepest layer of the infrastructure and you kind of build up through there into the Devops teams into the app dev teams into maybe even something sort of above the app dev team which would be like a low code solution where you're just using something like build.io or something like that. Something that we wouldn't normally think of as developers right. So that spectrum is broadening on both ends and people are moving down the stack and moving up the stack. The network engineers one of the things in DevNet we're working on is what we call the evolution of the network engineer and where is that going and network engineers have had to learn new technology before and now there's just a new set which includes automation and APIs and configuration management, infrastructures, code and so they're moving up the stack. And then developers are also starting to think I really want my application to run well on the network because if no one can use it then my application's not doing anything and so things like the optimized for business that we have with Apple where a developer can go in through an SDK and say I want to set these QOS settings so that my app gets treatment like that's a way that they're converging and I think that's really interesting. >> Peter: So one of the things that we've been working on at Wikibon I want to test this assumption by we've talked a little bit about it is the idea of a data zone. Where just as we use a security zone as a concept where everything that's in that zone and it's both the technologies there's governmental there's other types of, has this seized security characteristics and if it's going to be part of that conglomeration it must have these security characteristics. And we're no thinking you could do the same thing with data. Where you start saying so for example we talked earlier about the idea that the network is what connects places together and that developers think in terms of the places things are like the internet of things. I'm wondering if it's time for us to think in terms of the network in time or the network is time and not think in terms of where something is but think in terms of when it is. And whether or not that's going to become a very powerful way of helping developers think about the role that the network's going to play is the data available now because I have an event that I have to support now and it seems as though that could be one of those things that snaps this group, these two communities together to think it's in time that you're trying to make things happen and the network has to be able to present things in time and you have to be cognisant of in time. It's one of the reasons for example why restful is not the only way to do things. >> Right exactly. >> IOT thinks in time what do you think about that? >> Yeah I think that's really interesting and actually that's something we're diving in with our community on is so you've been a developer you've worked with rest services and now you're doing IOT well you need to learn a lot of new protocols and how to do things more in real time and that's a skill set that some developers maybe don't have they're interested in learning so we're looking at how do we help people along that way. >> John: Well data in motion is a big topic. >> Exactly yeah absolutely. And so I think and then the network, thinking about from a network provider like I need this data here at this time is very interesting concept and that starts to speak to what can be done at the edge which is obviously like an interesting concept for us. >> But also the role the network's going to play in terms of predicatively anticipating where stuff is and when it needs to be there. >> Yeah yeah I think that's a really interesting space. >> But it's programmable if you think about what' Cisco's always been good at and most network and ops guys is they've been good at policy based stuff and they really they know what events are they have network events right things happen all the time. Network management software principles have always been grounded in software so now how do you take that to bridging against hat's why I see a convergence. >> Amanda: We should have a conference around that. >> It's called DevNet Create. Okay so final question for you as you guys have done this how's your team doing with the talks was one going on behind us is a birds of a feather IOT session you've got a hack-a-thon over here. Pretty cool by design that we heard yesterday that it's not 90% Cisco it's 90% community 10% Cisco so this is not a Cisco coming in and saying hey we're in cloud native get used to us we're here you know. >> Absolutely not so it's I'm really proud of how my team came together around that so I have our team of developer evangelists who we connect with the developer community and we really look at our job as this full circle of we get materials out and learning and get people excited about using Cisco APIs and we also bring information back about like here's what customers think about using it, here's what the community's doing all of that. So when we started DevNet Create we set the stake in the ground of we want this to be way more community content than our content we produce ourselves. And so the evangelists did a great job of reaching out into communities, connecting with speakers, finding the content that we wanted to highlight to this audience and bringing it in so that the talks have been fabulous, the workshops have been a huge hit it's like standing room only in there and people getting a seat and not wanting to leave because they want to keep their seat and so they'll stay for four workshops in a row you know it's been amazing. >> I think it's great it's exciting for me to watch 'cause I know the developer goodness is happening. People are donating soft we see Google donating a lot of open source even Amazon on the machine learning you guys have a lot of people that open source but I got to ask you know within Cisco and it's ecosystem of a company we see a lot or Cisco on our Cube events that we go to. We go to 100 events last year we've been to 150 this year. We saw Dehli and Ciro we saw some Cisco folks there. Sapphire there's a deal with Century Link and Honna Cloud, Enterprise Cloud so there's Cisco everywhere. There's relationships that Cisco has, how are you looking at taking DevNet Create or are you going to stay a little bit decoupled, be more startup like and kind of figure that scene out or is that on the radar yet? >> So I think we know with starting DevNet Create for this first year what we really want to do is get foundation out there, stake in the ground, get a community started and get this conversation started. And we're really looking to in the iterative experimental way look at what comes out of this year and where the community really wants to take it. So I think we'll be figuring that out. >> John: So see what grows out of it. It's a thousand flowers kind of thing. >> Yeah and I think that it will be, we will always have the intention of keeping that we want to keep the mix of audience of infrastructure and app and we'll see how that grows so... >> Well Amanda congratulations to you, Rick and Suzie and the teams. I'd like to get some of those experts on the Cube interviews as soon as possible. >> Absolutely! >> And some crowd chats. You guys did an amazing IOT crowd chat. I'll share that out to the hashtag. >> That was really fun. >> Very collaborative you guys are a lot of experts and Cisco's got a lot of experts in hiding behind the curtain there you're bringing them out in public here. >> That's right. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> We're here live with special inaugural coverage of DevNet Create, Cisco's new event. Cloud native, open source, all about the community. Like The Cube we care about that and we'll bring you more live coverage after this short break. >> Hi I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior director of Strategy and Planning for Cisco.

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco It's the Cube. Covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone. Live in San Francisco, this is the Cube's exclusive coverage of the inaugural event for Cisco systems DevNet Create. It's an extension or augmentation, a foot in the water of the new open source world for them. Cloud native DevOps infrastructure is code. It's Cisco's new mission, where applications meets infrastructure AKA infrastructure's code which is music to the ears of DevOps and all application developers. I'm John Furrier. My cohost Peter Burris, Head of Research at wikibon.com. Our next guest is Bradley Wong, Director of Product Management at Docker. Bradley welcome to the Cube. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, great, Thanks John. >> Docker, no other company to reference in terms of being a shining star in a paradigm shift or transformation where containers, Docker containers, and now containers and Kubernetes microservices has taken cloud and brought it into a whole nother dimension. We've been covering you guys at all your Dockercon events. It's been gray multiple years. Congratulations for your success. >> Bradley: Thank you. >> You got to be happy that you got Cisco coming out saying hey we're going to make the network programmable. Finally! You know, let's do it. Thoughts? >> Yeah, we're very excited about that. It's kind of interesting because we also found that networking is also one of those things that's quite difficult. And we saw this challenge probably about more than two years ago, after people started to get more comfortable with containers and they wanted to start doing some more interesting things with them and start getting the containers to talk to each other and the rest of the world. That's kind of really where we saw that networking could be improved upon. And I think maybe you remember, probably about two years ago now, maybe more actually, we made an acquisition company called SocketPlane? >> John: Yep. That really helped us define what it means to really do networking properly. And that was actually the genesis of where even the Cisco partnership also started devolving as well, because at Docker we really needed to build out a framework for how to do networking properly internally first. And we always followed a mantra, the mandate of batteries included but swappable. So, we built a reference implementation of what it meant to do networking properly for containers. But, in doing so we also then worked quite closely with Cisco to also bring their many, many years of expertise to the table as well. So, and you can probably see that now with the culmination of projects like Contiv, which is actually now a certified plug-in on Docker store. Cisco's really stepped it up and has really made lots of really great inroads and done a lot of good additions to Docker networking. >> It always seems that way. The conversation, we've been also following a lot of other communities, like OpenStack for instance, there's always debates but it always gets down to ay the network, network. I've had so many customers (mumbles) It's really hard. And also you see Cisco get pulled into conversations just but gravity pulling them in because they're the network guys. So now, it's nice to see that the executives at Cisco, led by Susie Wee and the team and Rick, not just puttin' their toe in the water, they're jumpin' in the deep end here with the cloud native approach by going to developers and outreaching to them in a different way and saying look it, we want to make your life easier. >> Bradley: Absolutely. >> That's what you guys have done. So certainly a success to you guys who are in Cisco, doing the work around the fringes but now that they're coming in, how do you, how would you tell someone, describe that move for Cisco? I mean, obviously Cisco has not been absent. They've been there with you guys. >> Bradley: Yeah. >> What does this really mean for them as they go fully committing here now? Right, that's a good question. Cisco is beyond just a, obviously, a networking company that's kind of' where it's roots came from. But we saw that there was some good opportunities to work with Cisco, not just on networking but a few other things. I think what a lot of people probably get familiar with Docker because it's a great development tool to start. And that's really where people's first interactions with Docker really is. It's really easy to get started, really easy to start building your applications in Docker, and start moving those applications into other environments, like going from Dev into Tes into Prod very, very seamlessly. So, Docker really becomes that sort of what we call a software supply chain that really enable Dev and Ops to use the same tooling, the same tool chain, end to end. And we feel that if we're able to use the same tool chain end to end, from Dev all the way through to Ops, we alleviate a lot of the challenges to deploying applications to production. Now, Cisco so far has been very, very strong in the Ops space, very strong in the infrastructure space, and we also come very, very strongly from the developer space as well. So, I think as we basically build out this software supply chain, there also is a need to make sure that there is this kind of underlying infrastructure that's also ready to run that software supply chain as well and to really harden it. And that's what, one of the first things that we really did with Cisco is to make sure that we have a very clear vision of how to make that operationalizable for the enterprise. >> Second time I've heard the word software supply chain. Peter's also used the word data supply chain. Data is asset (mumbles) software. Software is an asset. It's data as well. What is software supply chain mean? Describe that for a second. Take a minute to explain. >> So yeah, that's a good question. So in any supply chain I think there's sort of a progression of where there's inputs, where things come in and for us, we're on a mission to build tools of mass innovation. So, we really want to start with the developer and that's really where a lot of really good stuff comes from. Everyone's got great ideas and we piece those ideas together, give them the tools that they know how to use really well to develop them. But, it's not just good to have great applications, they need to be usable and they need to be able to be deployed. And what we believe the software supply chain is taking that development process and being able to have developers put their artifacts inside containers and then move those, because that's really what it is, it's actually moving those artifacts into places where they can be shared with greater teams to start testings those and to start iterating on those. And ultimately to move those into production whether it's on premise or whether it's in the cloud. And that's what we believe that we enable, is that movement of, and that >> John: Coding motion. >> Exactly. Exactly. And that doesn't stop there because, as you know, code is not stable. There's always iterative process and we enable that as well. So then , as we find issues or enhancements that we want to fix in production, we move that back to developer and that whole process starts again. Be able to do that really, really, quickly is what we want to do. >> So let's stay in that metaphor for a second. If we think about this as a software supply chain, Does that make Cisco a logistics supplier? >> I would say, with any supply chain, Cisco, once again, has lot's of different areas that they're focusing in and by no means am I speaking on behalf of Cisco where >> Peter: I understand. Just conceptually, are they the Ryder trucking, are they the ones responsible for moving things around? >> Yes, that's one of the places that Cisco does play very, very strongly in. For example, we identified that the computer platform that Cisco has, the UCS platform, is a great place to actually run Docker in production, especially on premise. And that's definitely one of the things that we needed to start validating, all these different infrastructures, that can actually have the right availability, the right performance characteristics, and things that then we can do together to make sure that these are essentially solid infrastructures to actually run these production environments on. Now, Cisco's been running solid enterprise infrastructure for many, many years. Docker's been running Dockerize applications also for many years as well. The marriage of the two, we hope and we believe that will culminate in a lot of the enterprises, which were very accountable at running enterprise applications on top of enterprise infrastructure, to now run Docker applications on enterprise infrastructure as well. So, just making sure that there is very, very good infrastructure that's in place to actually host that supply chain, I think that's definitely one of the key areas that we are hoping to get out of this partnership with Cisco. >> So now that we've talked about here in the last couple days (mumbles) is Conway's Law. And I'm sure you're familiar with Conway's Law. >> Bradley: Right. >> Which is basically the observation that the software that's generated is a reflection of the organization that generated it. You can use Docker or any other container technology to create really crappy software if you want to. >> Bradley: Yep. But one of the things that Docker does introduce is the idea of segmentation, compartmentalization, while at the same time simplified mechanics for how things work together. So talk a little bit about the expectations of people who get into the Docker and container world should have of the network. How should they think about, should they think about their software as essentially distributed elements that then require a network? What's your thoughts on that architecturally? How is it going to play out? >> It really depends on where their journey sits. Once again, I think we are the suppliers of these tools of innovation. But we want to also hold their hand as well through this journey. And that journey is not done day one. It's a step by step process as well. So, a good example is you can start off and build the greatest distributed microservice application and that might work well for certain parts of your company, but there's certainly many, many other applications that are already deployed out there, which it may not fit, at least not today, and there's a journey to take those existing, traditional applications along that journey as well. So, anything that basically requires interaction, with other components, any services that need to talk to each other, to the external world, obviously requires a network. Networking has been a very, very tough thing in the past. They're not always the simplest. Sometimes it could be over complicated. >> Peter: Sometimes? >> (laughs) Many, Many times. >> In all honesty, I do think that the network professionals have gone out of their way to make the network as obscure and abstract as possible. >> Bradley: You know, I think >> John: They're command line guys. Come on. (laughs) >> I've been in the networking world for a long time as well, before joining Docker. So, I see some of that. I think networking guys tend to, and girls, tend to really look at what are all the different things that we can do, all the different little knobs that we can actually tweak to squeeze every little bit of performance, convergence time, things like that, that might work well in some environments but may not others. That's why you needed so much variability, hence all these nerd knobs, so to speak. Docker comes from a very different place. If you look at the mentality of how we drive things, Usability is a very, very key thing for us. We talk about usable security, we talk about simple orchestrator, (mumbles) for example, We forgo the complex to focus on things that are usable. So, networking for us, we wanted to initially look at it and say, networking should be something that's simple and usable and essentially get out of the way of the developer. Developers shouldn't have to think about all these overcomplicated concepts. The network should be able to form its way around what the application needs and that's really what we're thinking about there. >> Peter: Make it simpler and no simpler than it needs to be. >> John: And make it programmable. >> Bradley: And make it programmable as well. Simple and programmable. And when I say programmable, we're not expecting Ops folks to have to learn how to code necessarily. I think if there's the right tools that are available, that should be a natural flow on. >> You have to enable it so that the app developer doesn't have to do all the hard stuff, like configuration management, all the hardware and the operational stuff that the networking guys have done for them. >> Bradley: Right. >> 'Cause they're not Ops guys right? They're Devs. >> That's a really good point because today, there is not really one single tool chain, and coming back to my earlier point, of what we're trying to solve for. There's not really one single tool chain that Ops folks use, and application developers use. They traditionally use different tooling. What we're trying to do is, first to have that common foundation of common tooling that people can converge on. And the second then is, if we provide all the right hooks, so, just enough hooks for the application developer to say, this is what my application looks like and then enough hooks for the operations folks then plug in and say hey, these are my security policies. These should talk to these and these shouldn't talk to these. And once we have the right ingestion points there, we should be able to take that end to end without having to manually ingest all these different after the fact concepts into that development process. It should be a natural flow on. We're not saying the work is done there. There's still a lot of things to do. But I think the first glimpse of what we have there is stunning. Docker, as you may know, has some great tools to define what an application is. Docker Compose, for example, you can see how a multi-service application is laid out. Cisco can actually then, provide plug-ins into that composed (mumbles) and say well, this web tier needs to talk to this application tier, and these are the basic premises of what networking security tools can then plug into to enforce policy. So, we feel that that can be a lot more automated. And we'll work towards that. >> Bradley, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Really appreciate it. Great to see ya again. And Docker obviously continuing to do great and we'll continue to cover all your events. But my final question for you is, Take a minute to just explain quickly and succinctly for the audience, the Docker Cisco relationship. What is that? I mean, joint partnership? Is it, you guys just hi fivin' each other? You actually writin' code together? Is there a technology partnership? Give some details on the relationship. >> Yeah, sure. It's a strategic partnership, which basically means that it goes beyond just hi fiving each other. There's some of that as well but we believe that any relationship of this size needs to be built on solid attainable things. So, we worked on the Contiv project together, for example. We also worked together on what we call Cisco validated designs for Docker. >> John: Just joint engineering. >> Joint engineering work. We also work on joint marketing and joint go to market motions as well and joint support. So, you can actually call up Cisco for a Docker, Cisco solution that's deployed out there, you can call up Cisco support and they will hold that trouble ticket and if any troubles do arise, they take the call and then work on that on behalf of us. >> It's a nice relationship. It's a win-win. They get some cloud native mojo with Docker and this new app world. You guys get enterprise access to the huge amount of clients that they have. >> Bradley: Exactly. Alright, final, final question, Since one just popped in my head. It always happens that way when you're going to roll. But, what's on the roadmap for you guys with respect to the Cisco and this DevNet Create, obviously is going to their foray into this new world and bring in a new eco system with DevNet their core application, I mean, their core developer community, What's on the Docker roadmap? What can we expect to see that's going to be fruits of the labor? >> I think one of the things that we're definitely going to be focusing quite a lot on is to look at that first step of that journey, which is even taking, not just the microservices, that everyone loves to talk about, but even the traditional applications, those monolithic applications that are already deployed out there running mission critical enterprise workloads on there, We want to take those, together with partnerships, like Cisco, and Dockerize those. And eventually, modernize them and eventually evolve them into microservices. >> Yeah, might get those mission critical apps microservicized if that's a word. (laughs) Bradley Wong, Director of Product Management, Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the Cube. Live coverage at the Cube here at the Cisco's inaugural event. Again, great show. (mumbles) I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. More analysis and commentary and interviews after this short break. (robotic music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live in San Francisco. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco's new inaugural DevNet Create event targeting the DevOps open source community as they put their toe in the water, their foray into a community approach to build on top of their success of their classic developer program, DevNet, which is only three years old. Shouldn't call it classics. It's actually emerging still and growing. Arnesc is our pitch, Joshipura GM, Network and Orchestration at the Linux Foundation. I'm also joined with my cohost Peter Burris. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you again, welcome back. Cube alumni. Obviously open networking. You guys are involved, you're having a great show, we cover it every year. Open Networking Summit, among other things. Huge demand for the technologies. An appetite for content in your area. Here at Cisco DevNet Create, you're seeing the emergence of Cisco taking their roots in networking and plumbing and operations, which, by the way, you know from the networking world. Sacred cows all over the place. Bringing it to the wild west, agile developer who wants infrastructure at Cisco is bringing that application meets infrastructure saying, we're going to bring programmable networking. That's music to the ears to the developers so we are getting infrastructure as code. That's your wheelhouse. What's going on in the Linux Foundation to continue this momentum? How do you guys look at this trend, give us the update on how the Linux Foundation is participating, supporting, getting involved with this programmable networking infrastructure as code trend. >> Sure. So first of all, let me baseline everybody. Linux Foundation is here to create the largest shared technology investment by building sustainable ecosystems. That's the mission in life. Within the Linux Foundation obviously the most successful open source project is Linux. But we're way beyond Linux. We host a whole set of open source projects starting from cloud native, CNCF, cloud foundry to blockchain projects like hyperledger, automotive grade Linux and a whole variety of Let's Encrypt, you name it. That we facilitate this shared technology investment. The area I own, which is networking, has several projects up and down the stack. All the way from data plane acceleration to orchestration, analytics and it's intended for carriers, enterprise, and cloud service providers including one of the most recent, highly successful and much in demand project called ONAP which is a full network automation stack. Open network automation platform. Which again, is an open source way to connect apps to infrastructure. This is the movement that you just mentioned and I'm really excited that the community's finally realizing the implications of the three letter acronym that started this whole thing called SDN. (laughing) >> SDN, SD when, a lot of stuff going on. Software defined, data center, obviously Cisco has a huge dominant preposition in the enterprise, data center in particular, but also they have a huge service provider business MSL. All that, they've been connecting networks on internet scale since the '90s. Really doing a great job. Now they got to really think about the future. What's your view there because I think Linux Foundation, you guys have been great stewards for sustainable ecosystems, but now Cisco has to put their toe into the new ecosystem. What's the meaning of that? What's the view, outlook? What's your take on where they're at? It looks good off the tee, middle of the fairway as we were saying earlier. Messaging's good, 90% of the content's community, agenda's relevant, looks good. >> I think our perspective is there's a major disruption happening. But it's not a technology disruption, it's an end user disruption. What I mean by that is the end users, whether it be carriers, whether it be enterprises whether it be cloud service providers, they are demanding that open source be part of the agenda. The reason for that is very simple. It's providing more agility, providing the access to the source code to allow for much faster feature development. They want to contribute, they want to develop the ecosystem to meet their requirements and everybody is unique as we all know. What is happening is, in this new environment, vendors, service providers, carriers, everybody is re-inventing themselves. They're re-inventing themselves with a new business model and the business model is essentially, how do I take a leadership role in developing this shared technology investment? It's not about a box. It's not about the fastest and the smallest and the largest switch routers, etc. It's about a software plan. >> It used to be about free software. Now, nothing's free because people are putting their company's name on the line. Their business models now are integrated to open source and they have people involved in other parts so technically it's free software but it's really, technically not free. But this is the new business model, this is what people are doing. >> I think you can-- >> It's tier one resource. >> If you look at the world's largest carriers today, whether it's in China, whether it's in US or in Europe, they have deployments that are built on open source. Open source networking specifically is becoming mainstream in terms of deployment. >> What's the hottest mainstream product right now? Is it SDN? What's the hottest in the-- >> SDN is a technology. SDN, NFV, network function virtualization. Those are technologies that enable the deployment of open source projects. We got projects like Open Daylight, ODL, OPNFV, ONAP, these are just names. Again as networking-- >> What's the hottest here, NFV or-- >> Right now ONAP is the hottest. As networking guys we always make these three or four letter acronyms so sorry to bug you. >> That's okay I don't mind. >> But that's how it is. >> So one of the observations at least we made at Wikibon and we made it here a couple times, is that open source has proven to be magnificently successful when the target is well defined. Other words, conventions of an operating system, there's no disagreement about what an operating system does. Hence open source could create a Linux that has just been wildly successful. Open source has not been as good at redefining the new use cases or where the technology might go. Therefore, a lot of times open source developers end up looking at each other and making each other's tools work. Which is, for example, in the big data universe, restricted the adoption of Aduke and the ability of Aduke for example. So getting value you out of it, but it's not as successful as it might be. That raises a question. I'm wondering what role you play in all this. Is there a need for a degree of open source leadership that can set the big picture, the longterm trends without undermining the innovative and inventive freedom of how developers have demonstrated they want to work together? What do you think? >> I think that's an excellent question. What happens is just by throwing software on say, Github, doesn't make you an open source project. I mean yeah, it does make you open source but that doesn't make you a successful open source project. You need a community behind it. You need a community of developers and a sustained ecosystem. One of the things we are championing, and I'm personally driving that agenda, which is thought leadership on how do these pieces fit together. As we are moving from components that were disagregated in networking to production ready software components, to production ready solutions, these all need to fit together and developed in its entirety. When you look at it holistically, from a solutions perspective, the most important thing that matters are use cases. So what we have done-- >> Totally agree. >> What we have done is for every project, strategically, when the requirements are laid down, I think of that as a requirements document. Or when the architecture is laid down. The end user use cases are explicitly defined for the community. The architecture is laid out. In that framework, the Linux Foundation facilitates the developments, the infrastructure the devOps, the agile model to come and co-create this technology in this area. >> So that's how you're doing the ideation. Are you then taking that and stepping up and also doing some of the design work? And it sounds like you are. >> We facilitate the community to do the design work, we give them architectural part leadership, we give them inter-project cross-leadership. For example, we have, in my group, in networking we have about 11 plus projects. There are multiple data plane acceleration projects. When you're putting a solution, you want portion of data plane acceleration to ride on a control plane, to ride on orchestration, to be tested end to end. Projects like OPNFV for example, they test all the pieces. They test things like FDIO, which is an acceleration project, they test open stack. Which again, it's not Linux Foundation but we do bring all the pieces together. Effectively the end user has it relatively easy to adopt and start installing. >> Congratulations, I saw that the Linux Foundation recently hired Sheryl Chamberlain as the Chief of Staff. Cube alumni been on many times, shout out for Cheryl. So you guys are growing. How are you guys handling the growth? I want to get your thoughts and you don't have to speak for the whole foundation but in general, for the folks not necessarily familiar with the inner workings of the Linux Foundation, like open source, you guys are always evolving and growing. How are you serving your stakeholders, your members and taking care and maintaining the sustainable ecosystems? >> The difference between a typical, throw the code up on GitHub versus actively managed, sustainable ecosystem is where Linux Foundation comes in. What we provide to projects in different capacity, is everything from IT as a service, marketing as a service, program management, thought leadership, executive directors, PR, media, and most importantly, events, global events to get the word out. All of that service, if you may, is what facilitates the community. Once the community is all coming together, things happen. I'll just give you an example, we just completed a developer summit on one of the projects called ONAP. Ran out of capacity, clearly. 200 people from world-wide, top-notch architects got in a room and they discussed how to merge almost 15 million lines of code. And they figured it out in four days. >> Over coffee. >> Not over coffee, it's like four days. >> I'm kidding (laughing). >> But they figured it out. I think that level of facilitation that we can provide, because you can't have it on a blank piece of paper. You need some framework, some governance, some model and some processes on how to do it. That's what Linux Foundation excels at. >> I want to move into the third area I want to discuss with you, us. You mentioned the three major customer and end users. Carriers, enterprises, cloud service providers. How do you guys relate and serve those customers when there's other stuff going on in the industry? We see Open Compute, Facebook's doing a lot of stuff, Google's throwing in a ton of open source. We have yet to see Amazon make their move with donating really good networking stuff. Certainly we've seen some machine learning out there, but, we're expecting to see an arm's race of presents coming in. It's like open bar at the hotel. More goodness is coming in from the big guys sponsoring great code. >> My mission is this year, at least, one of the things I've laid out at ONS this year was to harmonize the ecosystem. And harmonization doesn't mean merge it all so now we're one solution. Harmonization means understand where each other solutions interwork, inter-operate. If they overlap, we end up merging the projects, like what we did for ECOMP and OpenAL. That's one of the missions. Now in that process, we're looking, not just within the Linux Foundation and in my role, but also outside. That includes not just the software stacks, but also the hardware infrastructure layers. That would be OCP, that could be TIP, etc. And several others that are coming up. As well as harmonization with standards bodies. We believe that standards and open source coexist and there is a complimentary relationship there. We've been actively working with several of the standards. MEF, Team Forum, etc., etc. Trying to get a view. We just published a white paper on the Linux Foundation website on harmonizing standards on open source. There is a whole movement of ecosystem because at the end of the day, a carrier wants to solve a problem. They don't care how we solve it. I mean they do but not in a fragmented sense. And that problem is different from what an enterprise wants to solve and it's different from what a cloud. Now to your earlier question, the great news is cloud carriers and enterprises, they're looking and smelling the same as cloud native apps, cloud container networking and open source networking, they're all start combining, coming together. >> So I want to share with you a comment we had the other day. There's a story of the four wolves that were put into Yellowstone Park and changed the ecosystem cause Yellowstone had a river problem. So they injected four wolves into the ecosystem. Turns out, the deer went away, things started growing, and the whole ecosystem became so much more sustainable. Not that I'm trying to get at who's the wolves, but balancing and coexistence is the point here. You can live with wolves and not get eaten, unless you're their target. But there's a balancing act on ecosystems. And to have a good, sustainable ecosystem you need to have freshness, certainly standards and new blood, new ideas. What is your vision on coexistence because this is one of those things that we're seeing right now emerging, less about my project's better than your project. You're seeing a lot more collaboration going across communities. >> Correct. >> More than ever. >> A hundred percent agree. I think the fundamental problem has always been only the technical geeks understand the differences between the projects. And then the layer of abstraction in people, whether it's management or media, they start looking and feeling as if they are competing. I'll give you an example. In the data plane acceleration kit, we have projects like FDIO, DPDK, Iovisor, OVS, there's lots of projects there. And people like, oh my god, there's so many. Well, guess what? One of them is a kernel driven thing, other one is a set of libraries, third one builds on the libraries. So that level of understanding is missing. >> John: Interplay between all the projects. >> It's interplay. >> Peter Burris: And dependency. >> And dependencies. So that's one of the things that we want to highlight here, very significantly this year in terms of just sheer education. Because part of the coexistence is understanding each other. If we understand each other on what role each of the projects play, it's easy. Whether it's Linux Foundation or outside. So that's the first step. The second step is if they're complimentary, I want to take the next step and test them out for inter-operability. Because now you have put two pieces together. Remember, networking was a fully black box five years ago. >> Literally. >> We took it, blew it up, fragmented it, dis-segregated it, and now we got to pull... And we got tremendous innovation out of each of these layers. We were very successful on the whole disaggregation and SDN disruption. Not it's time to put it into a production ready solution. As we put those things in, we'll see that harmonization is going to play a big role. >> Arpit great to have you on here, sharing the insight. Always great to get the inner workings plus a great perspective on the industry trends and congratulations on your success and we'll continue to follow you and all your work in the networking area, all the projects Stu Miniman and team. We're going to continue to see you at the Open Networking Summit, among all the great shows. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on, live coverage here in San Francisco, as part of our exclusive two day coverage of the inaugural Cisco DevNet Create event. I'm John here with Peter Burris, we'll be back with more after this short break, stay with us. >> Hi I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director

(electronic music) >> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for Cisco's inaugural event. First time they're having DevNet Create, an extension of their classic DevNet program. I guess not so classic, Peter, it's been only three years. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, and here my co-host, Peter Burris, general manager of Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jim Bugwadia who is the founder and CEO of Nirmata startup. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. >> So, thanks for coming on. First question before you get started, what do you guys do? Take a minute to talk about what your company does, and why are you here at Cisco DevNet Create. >> Right. Yes, so Nirmata is a SaaS for cloud application delivery and management. So what we do is, you can think of us as a logical layer above the big three cloud providers as well as private clouds, and we provide a common set of application services for developers who are looking at multi-cloud use cases, and even edge computing moving forward, to provide a common layer. >> I was just covering SAP Sapphire last week, again, on multi-cloud again coming out. Multi-cloud is the hottest trend right now in terms of what people are seeing. And that makes a lot of sense. No one cloud is going to win it all. There's never been a winner-take-all, Jerry Chen at Greylock said that many years ago. Turns out he's right. However, you got the big cloud guys lining up. The question is, multi-cloud, is it reality yet? Or it's just hybrid IT, hybrid cloud, just the stepping stone to potentially a multi-cloud world. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, good point, and hybrid is certainly the stepping stone but what we're seeing more and more is the application sort of being chosen to go on one cloud or another. So it's not at a point where we're seeing the same application span multiple clouds but based on the workload, based on the application type, enterprises deciding whether to put them on private cloud, public cloud or a choice of public clouds. >> So, define multi-cloud real quick. Take a minute. So let's get your definition of what is multi-cloud. >> Right, so to me it's a combination of being able to choose your infrastructure services primarily, and being able to have a portable set of application components and constructs which can span either these public or private cloud deployments. And today of course it's a lot of momentum towards public cloud but private cloud is also going to continue to grow and will continue to grow for various reasons. So having that choice of deployment is really what we're seeing as multi-cloud today. >> And of course put a plug in for Wikibon and Peter's research. They just put out on a new true private cloud report and they had it pegged at a market of what? 260 billion? >> For a true private cloud, yeah! >> For a true private cloud, yes. So you're right true is going to be big. >> And John, just another point. We are actually doing a multi-cloud crowd chat tomorrow at 9 a.m. Pacific. So, anybody that wants to participate in a crowd chat about multi-cloud, 9 a.m. Pacific tomorrow. >> Okay, good plug, check it out Crowdchat.net, check it, it's going to be right there on the front page. You should get on that Jim. But I want to ask you to go to the next level. Multi-cloud, let's peel the onion a little bit. Does that mean I can run workloads on any cloud, or do I put a workload on one cloud and then I put another workload on another cloud. Or, can this workload, if the capacity is bad, move over to another cloud. It just smells like a latency problem to me. It just seems like ungettable at this point. What's your definition, is that multi-cloud? What is multi-cloud? >> Yeah, so what is happening in the developer space of course with the big adoption of containers and the push towards containerizing applications, now we have that ability to rapidly spin up services as needed on different cloud platforms. And really, a cloud becomes a place where you can have a container host and an end-point for deployment. So you combine that with management services, application management services like Nirmata, and now you do have that choice of being able to set policies either based on demand and scale or usage, or based on recovery from faults in the infrastructure to span different clouds from the same workload. >> Okay, next question for you. Great to have you on, great subject matter expert there. Thanks for answering the questions. But this one is a little bit different. If I want to secure cloud, with say Amazon, put my stuff there. You've seen mostly Test/Dev, and the Oracle CEO talks about this all the time . It's pretty much all Test/Dev. Okay that ship has sailed. Pretty much no brainer. What percentage of the workloads now, or what workloads specifically are going beyond Test and Dev that you've seen that are going into production. Because now with hybrid, it opens up more range of apps beyond Test and Dev. So certainly Test/Dev is happening, we get that. Low hanging fruit. What's the next level? >> Yeah, so I think the one way to categorize it is systems of engagement and systems of record of course. So we're seeing anything public facing whether it's mobile, web-app properties, web applications, more and more micro-services style SOA applications. Those are the next wave that's going to cloud. Data residence tends to stay with private cloud for a longer term. But even that, over time we're seeing with VPC is, with the right security constructs, being a viable public cloud, being a viable option there. >> One of the top questions we have in our CrowdChat community, that comes up all the time around DevOps. So I'm going to get your thoughts on this. What advise would you give to operations practitioners who are afraid DevOps is going to automate away their jobs. >> Jim Bugwadia: Yeah (laughing) So, yeah, great great question, and that's very far away from the reality. What's happening with DevOps is now we're getting to a better definition of what Devs need to be concerned about and what Ops needs to be concerned about, right?. And again pointing to containers as one of the enablers, microservices as another. We're seeing where application developers want to operate their own applications. They want control of their destiny. But the furthest thing from their minds is to worry about IP addressing and security concerns and things like that. So there is, and it's interesting, because enterprise DevOps is very different than what you would find in a start-up or in a cloud or internet giant, right. And there is no mythical enterprise developer who can do all of this themselves. You need a Dev and you need an Ops. >> The mythical mammoth kind of goes out of the window. We had CMO, EVP earlier on. We had, it was Matt Howard, and he is an experienced guy. But he was saying, 100 developers have ten IT supports and one security person. He sees that completely flipping around. So if you take this whole notion of the jobs are going to go away. Which I think is BS. Certainly things have to be automated, machine learning is great for that. But you can see the shift happening. There're certainly more security guys. More operational IT guys not doing escalation, doing actual, real IT. So I think, there's going to be a shift of jobs. So you might be displaced functionally. You're a plumber, now you you're a machinist. I get that. Where are the hot jobs? If that's the case, if you believe, which I think you do. >> Right >> Where are they going to shift to, what does the job profile look like. >> Yes, much like we're seeing even in software development itself. The level of abstraction and the amount of knowledge that has to be absorbed, keeps increasing. So it's more similarly in operations what we're seeing, like you mentioned, rather than being something, doing something at a low level. Now its understanding what are the best policies for, let's take security as an example, in AWS, in Azure, in private cloud. How do you now make sure you have the right visibility and governance with things like containers, microservices, where the applications are so dynamic, it cross various environments. So it is a transformation in the type of role and skill-set, and I think it's for the better. Because now you really have time to step back and look at this holistically and contribute back to the business. >> Here's a philosophical question for you, and may be Peter you could weigh in too. What single misperception about DevOps would you like to see change out in there? As people try to grasp DevOps, we hear it's a movement, we hear it's a playbook, with this, it's an Agile Manifesto, grow organically, you know, Conway's Law, All kinds of stuff we've been talking about so bottom line, what is the most misunderstood or misperceived issue about DevOps >> Yeah >> That you would like to see changed. >> Yeah, so to us, the one issue that we always emphasize is there will be a Dev and there will be an Ops. And any product that tries to minimize one role or another is not a good fit for enterprises. So, what's needed is a transformation of that Ops role to the role, from just being the direct service provider, the hands-on ops person to more of a governance curation. In some ways an architect type of role, right? And that's what we're seeing, is that Ops role is not diminished. It's actually heightened and highlighted. >> John Furrier: Great point! >> We've already talked about it in 6many respects, the idea that we're going to go from application development to pushing a button and having the business suddenly run differently is just silly. At the end of the day-- >> You think people think that's what DevOps is? Just a magical, rub the bottom and the genie pops out. >> There is a lot of people that think that DevOps is a step on the path to no Ops. To having no people involved in operations at all. And that's just not going to happen. >> So you believe that Ops is still going to be relevant. >> I think Ops is always going to be relevant. I think that Dev is going to evolve to better understand, and have greater data and visibility on what's going on in Ops. And Ops going to have greater predictability in what's going to happen from a development standpoint. So I think we will see a combination of roles. We'll see the productivity of Ops continue to grow. But the idea that this is going to be, that there is magic in here, and Gandalf is going to wave his DevOps-- >> What would Trump say about DevOps? Oh we're great at it! I've done it 10 times! >> What would Trump say? Trump would say, I think Trump would say, "I've never been to Mexico." (laughing) >> I'm going to make it amazing. We'll build a wall of IT. (laughing) I needed to bring that in, sorry, laughing about Trump earlier with the whole thing going on. Okay. Good point. Some are saying in the community, not no Ops, but new Ops. It's a new kind of Ops. >> Yeah, the way we see it is that what we think of as DevOps is splitting more into functions like application operations, security operations, and infrastructure. So really all three need to be accommodated and they need to work together. And that's sort of how we have built up Nirmata as our private software. >> And there is ops for all three of them. In fact, the last conversation we had John was, and test you on this, is that, it is the inherent quality, or the inherent distributed quality of a lot of the new applications that we're building. Absolutely dictates that we start to parse Ops up differently. >> Jim Bugwadia: Right. >> That it's no longer running it on a single machine or on a single database with a network out in a client server domain. It is inherently distributed and therefore the tasks and the responsibilities and roles associated with the operations side of that are themselves going to be inherently distributed. Which requires new ways of thinking, new conventions, and new tools. >> Jim, I want to give you a final word. Give a plug about your company. Thanks for sharing your insight by the way. Appreciate you answering the questions. What do you guys do and what's up with the company? Talk about the status, the employees, how much funding you have, how much revenue you have, what's your goals. Go lay it all out. >> Yeah, so myself, my other co-founders, our background is enterprise software and we come from a network management background where we build centralized management systems for complex networks, distributed devices, etc. What we saw happening is with cloud applications are starting to mimic that complexity. And as applications move from back-office productivity functions to these hybrid distributed mission-critical, real-life functions that we use day-to-day, there is a need for this enterprise-grade management. So that's the type of centralized management we're delivering as a service to our customers. >> You have to become network of provides so you have to have app management. I mean that's pretty much what you're doing you're bringing network management paradigm to apps versus a monolithic app in some dashboard and now it's all over the place. Multiple form factors, access methods. It's a network in the app. >> It is. Yeah and today the customers are left to cobble together about 12 to 14 different tools correlate data across tools. And what we need to do is move beyond systems with just observe and report. To being able to observe, react and learn, and do things in real-time. >> John: Be actionable. >> Exactly! >> So you guys are simplifying that process. >> Jim Bugwadia: Absolutely. >> And is it a single pane of glass, is it a service, is it a software product? >> It's a cloud service. So you can think of us an overlay across any public or private cloud. And early on, we kind of decided, the best way to deliver infrastructure is as a service and we've learned that in real life. >> People who are doing that are winning. That's what Trump would say, winning. (laughing) He would say, I am going to the data lake swamp. >> Who knows what he'd say. (laughing) >> Of course I couldn't get that in there. Drain the swamp, he didn't get the data lake swamp. >> No I got it. >> Okay, go ahead. >> So we've built Nirmata completely as a cloud service because of that philosophy that we started with. And we want to give developers and DevOps teams the choice of any platform, right? And today it's all about cloud. The edge is also very real. We have industrial IoT customers who are looking at containers. >> Yes, your world is getting your TAM, your total customer market is getting bigger and bigger as every IoT device has data on it. Because data is an asset. It's part of the app. >> I want to bring that up. Just if we have just a second John. >> Yeah go ahead. >> I'm curious because on of the things that we believe is that increasingly the whole concept of digital business is how will data feature as an asset in your business? Especially if we're creating sustaining customers. Totally buy in to the idea of the external view versus the internal view. For customers versus for employees. That for customer side, the engagement side is really driving a lot of this. But at some point in time it makes me wonder if we're going to move from a DevOps orientation to a data ops orientation. Where at the end of the day, the physics of how things run is, where is the data, what saliency to get at it, how do you handle the state of it, etc. Do you foresee a... at least, or an extension of the DevOps concept so the data as an object is something that we act upon, and we understand what role it plays in this whole bringing together a lot of piece parts to create distributed digital systems. >> I think so. Starting point of that, that we're seeing is the split between data services and behavioral services. Look, any form of programming it's all about packaging behaviors and data, right? So whether it's in a programming language, and with object-oriented it was about putting things together in a object. Now with service oriented in microservices, it's the service bound rates. So having the data services and then having the behavioral services separated gives a lot of flexibility. And then being able to move the compute to the data versus the other way around that is also very interesting. So we're working with some partners where we're looking at cross cloud data. Can we, as even services in containers are spun up under one cloud. Can we clone an entire environment into another cloud. Can we migrate some of the data efficiently? Challenges like that. >> Well Jim, we're going to recruit you. I just made a note to ping you for tomorrow's CrowdChat. To see if you could make it or one of your co-founders. Love to get your input at the community as part of sharing insight into this really fast growing, changing world of management with all this complexity. I mean there are more tools out there than ever before. They are all different types, a lot of complexity. So we hope to bring you back in the studio, or have you come in via Skype, or CrowdChat. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage. Cisco's inaugural event, DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music) Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director of strategy and planning for--

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, It's the Cube covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for the Cube's exclusive two day coverage of Cisco's inaugural event: DevNet Create. An extension of the core DevNet community founded three years ago by our next guest. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Our next guest, Rick Tywoniak, Senior Director of Cisco DevNet, also the co founder with Susie Wee who was on yesterday. Congratulations on creating DevNet three years ago. >> Rick: Thanks John. >> Very successful. I said it's blowing up, I mean in a good way, doing great robust community and also creator of DevNet Create, Congratulations. >> Thanks, thanks John, appreciate it. >> So why DevNet Create? I mean just give us the quick why DevNet Create vs. DevNet, What's the difference? How should people look at those two events? >> So, DevNet Create is our event to reach out to a new community of developers. Typically an audience that may not have thought about Cisco in the past. may have thought of us as a hardware company doing routers and switching and we want to try to reach out to that new community to help them understand that Cisco has a great platform for them to develop on and there's great opportunity to work with Cisco. And so we want to get to that new audience. That's what the inaugural vision of DevNet Create is all about. >> Before we came on camera Peter asked you a question, you were getting rolling and we decide to wait. Go ahead ask the question. >> Why Cisco? >> Rick: Why Cisco? (John laughs) >> You know we were talking about, so there's a subset of developers; let's call them ISV, Independent Software Vendors, and when you think about the plethora of platforms out there, there's a lot of people that they can develop on. And so you've got to think about why Cisco. When I talk to developers a couple things: first of all you start with the platforms right? So is the technology cool and are the API's cool, and can you do something innovative with them, right? So you have Meraki location API's, you have Spark Collaboration API's, you have the networking API's right? And so the first thing we do is we start off with the technology and, you know, to be fair a lot of the developers, when you start talking about the technology that Cisco brings to market they weren't even aware. They just thought it was routering and switches, hardware. They weren't even aware that the network had API's that they can use, especially in the area of IOT. So educating the developers on what the technology is, is extremely important but it doesn't stop there. Because, okay it's cool technology but if I'm an ISV, eventually I need to make money so what can Cisco offer me that's unique and different and there's a couple of things that we do with inside DevNet which takes you sort of the partnership area. So if you're out there developing a software product and you integrate with our platforms and you develop some API's, the second thing that we also bring to our developers, who have companies usually, is introduction to the field and the channel, okay? So how do you ... >> John: So monetize? >> Yeah monetize this. We have one of this, so we help them monetize their app. And obviously it has to be a good app, it's got to be tested and certified and it has to have some customer traction but once you get customer traction, my group is also responsible for introducing them to the field and our channel organization to help them get out to market. And then we also have thirteen innovation centers throughout the world where you can do co-creation and get, even if you're early stage, get introduced to customers. Cisco's got a lot of customers in the enterprise, right? >> John: Right. >> We help, depending on where you are in the world, if you're in Latin America you can go to Brazil, if you're in Europe you can go to France and then England. You can get involved in these innovation centers and get out to the customer base and get opportunities. If you go from there, they get a lot of traction. Many times we'll put applications on the general price list, so our field and channel can actually sell those applications and get compensated. So now you're opening up, say if you're a small start up, and you want to take advantage of... You have to have a good application right? >> John: Right. It has to have the customers want it, but then you can start to leverage some of the field and the channel out there to get your application out to get bigger. >> Great, great explanation. Thanks for taking the time to lay that out there. My question for you is, we talked about this in our opening and today and in our wrap-up yesterday is: Cisco is a huge opportunity, I mean, you have network guys who are really great. They know the operations cold and it's known that not everyone has the operations skills >> Rick: Right! >> And DevOps has an ops piece, so this is a great direction for you, so we're both very complementary of that. Question is: what value does Cisco bring to the table because certainly, yeah, you've got monetization that's going to be great for the start ups. What value providing up the stack? Because you've got the networks, that's the crown jewel of the operations. Making it programmable. How is that valuable to the developer? >> Well, so, applications that are developed inside the enterprise have to run on the network. So everything you have or all the devices you have in an area of IOT, all have to run on the network so you start with that core sort of functionality that we provide and then you start adding the API's because all of the intelligence that works in the stuff that runs the network is now as exposed in an API layer. So now if you're a software developer inside an enterprise, taking advantage of those API's to have your application run more efficiently is the key, sort of sauce, that DevNet or Cisco provides through DevNet. You know, if you go back to the original vision of what we had: "So why did you start this thing" "And what was the vision?" So this idea of taking two groups that may have never talked to each other in the past. The networking professionals who really understood the network, software professionals inside an enterprise who really understand and build software. How do you bring them together and sort of create a community where those two are starting to understand what each other does, understand the skill levels that they have, work together, break down the silos, get out of their tribes, >> John: Um, Hmm >> Come together and in a DevOps environment how do you run software more efficiently? >> The Innovations there, you've got open source, you've got ... dominating the app developer market big time. >> Rick: Yup >> So you bring network guys who know ops to the application guys who don't want to now ops. >> Rick: They don't. >> And they can share. >> But increasingly, it's the, we talked about this yesterday with Susie, the network, the evolution of a lot of IT componentry, especially if you look at, for example: hardware, server, storage, there is a regular cadence of how it's improved. The network has always been a step function. We go from IPv4 to IPv5, whatever else it might be. There's always a step function and developers have always looked at the networks and it's too big and we don't know when the next big change is going to happen. As a stable, unchanging thing and it never impacted their vision of architecture or how they did things. And we're not too far off from another big step function that Cisco is going to be right in the middle of and having those two groups talk about how to do things today but also how to do things in a plan-full way to anticipate some of the big changes that are going to happen in network technology is going to be really crucial for developers to build stuff that's got more than a 3 month life to it. Do you agree with that? >> Absolutely, and all that came when we took that intelligence and moved it into a software layer. Because you have the opportunity to make it unstable which is not what you want to do, so you have to plan it out, you have to figure it out but you have to, once it's in software, you have to be able to leverage it and that's what it's all about. You know, the other component of DevNet is an educational component. So what we want to do is teach software developers the value the network and a little bit about networking and more importantly what those API's are but we're not trying to turn the software people into networking guys. And then for the networking guys, we're teaching them basic coding skills, so we're not going to necessarily making them a coder unless they want to do that, they could. It gives an appreciation for what the other group does and so we have a big educational component. >> Peter: And how each impacts the other. >> How each impacts the other cuz they can start talking to each other and working together. And when you start looking at a DevOps environment it is crossing the hallway to go talk to this other guy in another department and if we can educate these guys on how to work with each other I think it's kind of that pie level vision. >> The ops sharing is happening, you're seeing people share in the operational roles and you need to be people who know the network to do that. >> Rick: Yup. >> Okay, the question for you is: How are you going to get the folks who are watching or in the DevOps world, Cloud-Native world, on board? Is there a strategy or is it is going to be a loose affiliation, is it going to be a formal program? Obviously developer.cisco.com is the site but this great tag line: "Infrastructure meets applications" is interesting, or "applications meets infrastructure" is a really good vision. How do I get involved if I'm not a part of DevNet? >> Well obviously come to developer.cisco.com and get involved. Not everybody can hear ... >> Do I raise my hand and say, "I'm an app developer" or is there like a profiling kind of thing? >> Yeah there is, yeah! you come in and if you come into our learning area there is a learning track. I'm an app developer, I want to learn about networking; there. If I'm a networking guy and I want to learn about app development we have learning tracks that will take you through either. >> John: That's cool. >> Yeah. >> So just declare everything. I could say it and get it. >> Rick: Yup. We have events. DevNet Create is big but we actually have events all throughout the year and around the world. We call them DevNet express events, we're at Cisco Live, we're also going to be at various DevOps conferences so sometimes we just have to go to where the developer is. So you'll see us there with our developer evangelists. So yeah, no, there is definitely a plan to get the word out there and you're going to see a lot more Cisco. You know we've only been 3 years old. If you think about what we've accomplished in 3 years, pretty significant but we still have a long way to go. >> What's the big learnings you could share with the folks, it could be anecdotal, personal, business, from the process of 3 years, I mean, DevNet again, you guys were entrepreneurs, you weren't sure, the action was overwhelming, and congratulations for that. And now you've got DevNet Create. As I said, "Middle of the Fairway for you guys!" Did a good job here. What'd you learn? What's the learnings? >> It's risk taking, you know. You've got to take risks, you've got to fail, and you've got to mistake and you've got to learn from them. A lot of us that are in DevNet, including myself, came from the start up world, okay. And so you just know about that. You know: fail fast, fail often. >> John: Don't be afraid to take a risk. >> Don't be afraid to take a risk. When we had our first, when we started DevNet we had our first even at Cisco Live. We invested a lot of money to put a developer conference together in five months as a brand new organization. Literally I remember walking into that event at the Mochone thinking this could be empty, it could fall on the floor and I'm out of a job. (John laughs) Luckily when I came up that escalator at 10:00 the place was packed and we knew we had something. >> But in a classic strategy you doubled down! >> We doubled down yeah, now here we are again. Now we're getting out of Cisco Live, doing DevNet Create which is kind of separate from cisco by design. >> How do you feel about this event? When you walked in here did you feel like it's working? I mean, What's the vibe, what's your take on it? >> Yeah, and I think the cool thing is we are getting people that would not necessarily come to Cisco Live. Some of them do, you know we still have some of our loyal audience here. But yeah, we're talking about new topics and so we see this definitely as the future. We're going to do more of these events and we're going to do them in Europe in places like that. >> We certainly want you to come into our studio and talk more about this. It's something we're passionate about, as you know. Glad to support you guys here, think it's a great direction for Cisco and we love DevOps, We love Cloud-Native, we love Big Data, so you guys are on the right track, congratulations. >> Thank you very much. Rick, thanks for coming on the Cube, we really appreciate it, congratulations. The inaugural event for Cisco DevNet Create, exclusive coverage from the Cube and of course DevNet, check it out. Go to developer.cisco.com We'll be right back with more exclusive coverage after this short break. (techno music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the senior director of strategy

>> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone. We're live here in San Francisco, The Cube's exclusive coverage of Cisco's inaugural event DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My cohost Peter Burris, general manager of wikibon.com research. Next guest is Damon Edwards, co-founder of Rundeck. He's been on the crowd chats and does event DevOps and the enterprise, the content chair, co-founder of Rundeck, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Great to meet you. >> First and we've >> Good to be here. been in line chatting away. Quick though from you, Cisco getting into DevOps, the conversation's pretty straight forward. We think it's awesome that they're doing this. >> Damon: Yeah. >> Good direction, right in line with DevOps, things looking good, middle of the fairway. What do you do next? >> Damon: Yeah, I mean ... >> Where does Cisco take the ball from here and take it home? >> You know, I think it's just more of the same. I think that you can't underestimate the split that's happened in the DevOps have and have nots, that sounds kind of odd, but a lot that we talk about are the unicorns, the high flying special built organizations that really grew up with this in the last five to 10 years. I think where Cisco really plays is in the other 99% of commerce of the world, which is the core classic enterprises. DevOps really hasn't made that deep of a dent yet into that, I guess we call it dark IT, right? The rest of the world the people have to deal with 30 years of, in some places, different technology, skills, acquisitions, mismatches, all the legacy, all the bureaucracy of large organizations, and Cisco has a path into that and a voice of authority into that. So happy to see they're putting such emphasis on these DevOps and Agile ideas and help to drive them into that. >> And they got the app dynamics things going down too, that big acquisition. Their slogan is Where Apps Meet Infrastructure. We always just talk about infrastructure as code. They're talking about programmable networking, which is the same thing. We want more programmable. >> Damon: Right. So how do they make that transition to this new operational model? I mean, networks used to be very fragile, set in stone. >> Damon: Yeah. Someone used to joke, "Hey, they're called NoOps," because they would say no to everything from a developer standpoint. >> Damon: Sure. >> How do they transition from NoOps to a new operational model that's agile and adding value? >> The bigger issue here is that Ops is getting squeezed, right, so it's an existential crisis for them. The reason why they were always the no folks is because they're always spending their time protecting that capacity because they're overrun, they're always outnumbered, first of all, then they're being overrun with all these tickets of new stuff coming in plus incidents happening in the middle, the capacity has always been an issue. Now with this new DevOps, and really digital transformation inspired pressure, it's go, go, go faster, open things up. At the same time the same business folks are saying from the other direction lock things down, don't be the next hack. Don't be the next breach. Don't be the next major outage, right? >> John: It's really a lot of pressure It's a pressure cooker. >> Right. >> So they're squeezed. So the biggest with crisis, how do we relieve that, how do we relieve that pressure? And the key technique is to be able to actually allow other people to participate in what traditionally was only operations tasks. If you allow me to go one step ... >> John: Democratization of operations in a way. >> It is, and what they're doing, you see the organizations that really nailed this, they're dividing up the idea of an operations procedure. It used to be everything was in operations. You defined it, you ran it, and you have all security and management audit control over it. In these new ways what they're doing is they're breaking it up into three pieces to say the ability to define these automated procedures, the ability to execute them, and the ability to have that management control and oversight, let's make those in three discrete parts and let's move that to where the labor capacity makes the most sense. By doing that, operations can free up those bottlenecks, start to decouple more, allow the rest of the organization to move a lot quicker and not be in that horrible position of being squeezed to death and having to tell everybody no. >> There's a number of reasons why it's happening. Sorry. One of the key ones is that, and it brings us back to the Cisco conversation we're asking about this, is that is used to be that operations was tied to a particular asset. The server more often than not. And so a single individual could pool all those things together because a single individual, or single group, had control over virtually all the resources >> Damon: Right. >> that were a part of that. Now we're talking about applications that are inherently distributed, and so we can't look at the process of operations in the same way. This comes back to Cisco. Does the world need to think more discreetly about these new highly distributed, deeply distributed, applications differently, and is that going to catalyze the diffusion of more of these high quality DevOps principals? What do you think? >> Yeah, it has to. If you look at the business driver, which is this digital transformation, a lot of people scoff at because it's like wait, is this 1999? You need a website? What are we talking about, right? But you realize what it is is saying all these disparate systems we used to have, right. I could get my cable bill, but it's just online, it's just a PDF of what they send to the printers, right. But now on it, everything I could do when I call up the customer service agent, I want to do it through my phone or I want to do it on my laptop, and that means all those formerly distinct systems that lived in different windows on a customer service agents desktop and after the little things to check the router status blew up, well I'll just talk past it, right. But now it's really going to matter in this digital world. The business is driving that integration, so where things don't live in isolation anymore, and because of that the complexity and this distributed nature of these services is rising. >> John: Yeah. >> And when that that happens, that makes the operations inherently more difficult and just contributes to that squeeze even more and we got to find a way to relieve that. >> Great point and great analysis. That just picked off what we were talking about on our intro package of the redefinition of what a full stacked developer is. >> Damon: Yeah. >> Now full stack implies you're talking about a distributed application model where there's no isolation anymore so you could almost argue that that's going to be obsolete. It's a full horizontal developer. >> Well logic used to be full stack, but how they connect will be different. >> Which just brings up the notion of, okay, things were in isolation >> Right. >> built to the database, now I go down the network, now a whole new developer category potentially is emerging. Do you feel the same way? >> Damon: Yeah. >> I mean, we're speculating. We don't actually know. >> Sure. I mean, if you are Netflix, who prides itself on it's ability to go out, pay top of market, which means they are the top of market, and attract the best talent, only one can win that game. For everybody else in the world, this idea of we're going to have these polyglot, super human, I-know-everything engineers, it's never going to happen. We have to find a way to use our systems and our processes to allow that kind of integration to happen, and allow those people to define the control procedures and policies for the things that they know about, and then allow that all to integrate to where then we can have other folks operate it and run it. Again, that idea of moving those part around to where we can best take advantage of the labor, otherwise you're just ... You're never going to find it. Go to any conference, NASA DevOps Conference, and ask people how many LinkedIn spam messages do you get a day because the word DevOps is in your profile? >> Yeah. >> Everybody just laughs because it's dozens. You're never going to have that idea so you have to build the systems to recreate that full stack capability. >> And have people that have access to be one, rather than super human that becomes democratized at that level. >> Damon: Yeah. >> It's interesting. One of the things that you guys did at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, I know you were in the content chair. >> Damon: Sure. >> I made a note here for my ... Make sure I get this question to you, was I like this thing you guys touched upon. Is DevOps best left to grow organically or is there a growing need slash desire for an agile manifesto? (laughs) The top down, do the manifesto, or organic ... Thoughts? >> Yeah, I'd say no, because what DevOps is is a series of problem state- It's an umbrella over a bunch of problem statements and a bunch of solutions that keeps evolving. This is why the Devs conferences are so interesting because it's practitioners talking about what's worked for them. I feel like at the highest level, if you really need to have a definition, go ahead and read the Phoenix project or the DevOps handbook. They've done a great job of collating all of that, but at the end of the day it's not one thing. It's not a single practice. There's no single thing you can do to say I'm going to transform a major global financial services company into a fast, nimble operation. There is no one thing. It's a series of things that you have to try over and over again. Look at DevOps as a movement where you can learn from practitioners, apply it to your own organization, see what happens, report back, try some new stuff, and so on and so forth. >> So you could basically have a manifesto, but it's really just more of marching orders. Organically, it has to form on its own. That's basically the same. >> I think there already is. >> You could say hey we have a manifesto, but it's not like this is the playbook. You can get >> Damon: There is >> the handbook to learn. >> no playbook. >> Exactly. Okay, cool. Well, appreciate the insight. Let's talk about your business. What do you guys do? >> Damon: Sure. >> What are some of the things that Rundeck's doing that you're the co-founder of? Share a little bit about the company. >> Yeah, Rundeck is at the what is it, it's an orchestration and scheduling platform and it's used by operations organizations. Generally from large startups, but also large DevBox unicorns, but also a lot of large enterprises. What they're using it for is for defining and improving their operations procedures. What happens after deployment? Where do we define all the procedures to manage all these disparate systems, all these islands of automation. Chef and Puppet was the hottest thing around three years ago and now it's Docker and Kubernetes and everything else, and now we still have our old power shelf stuff, our late logic over there, some OpSquare stuff over there, so what are we going to do? We need a way to define the procedures, expand all those and allow people to participate in that operations world so they can relieve that crunch. We see a lot for automating the creative standard operating procedures like classic Runbook automation, with a next generation twist, we'll say, but we also see a lot of self service operations, meaning that let's let other people participate. Let's let developers define these procedures as Rundeck jobs, and then let operations vet them ... >> That's where you're talking about the operational being relieved a bit. >> Yeah, you have to. You can't just say there's one little group here that's going to deploy and run all of these things in this world. We have to let other people participate in that. Not just for deployment, which is big in the DevOps world, but for what happens after deployment that nobody wants to talk about. All the escalations, all the interruptions, all those problems, Rundeck really plays in that area help people to get that under control. >> Damon, thanks so much for sharing your insight. Congratulations on your startup and great to meet you in person. >> Yeah. >> We've had great chats in our crowd chat. You guys have been awesome with Gene Kim and the community that you're involved with with DevOps for the Enterprise Summit, practitioners sharing. That's a great ethos >> Damon: It's a pretty >> That really aligns >> awesome bet, yeah. >> with what's going on in the industry. Congratulations. More Cube coverage here exclusive of Cisco's inaugural event called DevNet Create, an extension of their DevNet core classic network and developer systems at Cisco. This is an open source one. This is out in the community. Not all Cisco, all part of the community. And of course we're bringing it to you with live coverage. I'm John for Peter Burris. Stay with us. (upbeat music) >> Hi. I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director ...

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live in San Francisco for theCUBE's special exclusive coverage of Cisco's inaugural event, DevNet Create, a foray into the developer opensource world as they extend their classic DevNet core developer program, three years old now, going into the opensource world, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with my cohost, Peter Burris, our next guest is Matt Howard, EVP and CMO of Sonatype, knows something about opensource, Matt, great to have you on theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So first, talk about Sonatype, what do you guys do? Give a quick minute to describe the company, then I got some pointed questions for you. >> Well, we provide tools and intelligence to modern development organizations to basically reinvent how opensource components are flowing through the pipeline, through the value chain, through the development lifecycle. >> You guys are a service, SaaS service, are you guys a subscription? >> It's a subscription service, and we provide two products, there's a product which is a repository manager called Nexus where you store, organize, and distribute software binaries into the development lifecycle, and then there's a second server product called Nexus IQ, which provides intelligence on top of those binary, so think of it as like FDA food labeling database, so if you're looking at a bag of potato chips as a consumer, you can see that there's calories, sugar, salt, it's gluten-free. If you're looking at a software binary, you're able to see metadata that we provide, which allows you as a developer to make intelligent decisions with respect to, this component's good for my application 'cause it's properly licensed, or this component's good for my application because it doesn't have any-- >> So you're a verifying code, basically, in a way. >> Yeah, absolutely. Verifying and qualifying the opensource-- >> John: And the problem you solve for the customer as well. >> The customer basically gets to build applications at scale, at speed, with quality opensource components. >> So you take the worries off, like, with the licensing, does it work well, you're like Yelp for software? There're comments? >> Sort of, more like Amazon reviews for opensource binaries. >> Okay, great, cool, thanks for taking the time. So we was just talking in our intro, opensource, I'm old enough to know when we used to pirate software, and then opensource, woo, this is great, and then it became a tier two in the enterprise player, Red Hat brought it to tier one. It's booming. Communities are changing. You're in the middle of it, what's happening? Give us your take on how opensource is evolving, because it's the classic case of cliche, opensource, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants before me, and now the next generation is standing on the current generations of shoulders, a new generation's happening, what's going on? >> So, just think of supply and demand, simple supply. We live in a world right now where development organizations are facing an infinite supply of opensource, there's a thousand new opensource projects a day, 10,000 new versions and 14 releases per year. The supply is massive. And in a world where supply is incredible, consumption is equally incredible, last year alone, there were 52 billion download requests from Maven Central for Java binaries, 50 billion-plus requests for NPM packages in the JavaScript ecosystem, so we are basically dealing with a world where software is no longer a marginal cost to doing business, it is the business. Developers are king, developers are the lifeblood that's flowing through every great enterprise today, because innovation is ultimately the thing that will allow companies to compete and win on a global playing field! >> I mean, it's almost intoxicating for these guys who are just drinking from the trough of free software, because if you compound the new projects with the fact that Google and these guys are donating awesome libraries, Amazons, machine-learning stuff, it's not something to shake a stick at, it's great software! >> Yeah! >> TensorFlow, Spanner, I mean, all this stuff-- >> It's great software, and just think, in a world of infinite choice, which is the world we're living in, how do you make the best choice? >> So where's the growth coming from? Peter and I were speculating that, in talking to Abby Kearns yesterday from Cloud Foundry, and then with the Cloud Native Foundation, a lot of money's coming in so the business model for players and vendors are coming in, and suppliers now helping out and donating software, but we're speculating that there's a whole growth area that's different than we've seen before. Are we on that? Your comment to that, your thoughts on where this evolution's coming from, the next wave, is it horizontal? >> Our view is that the devops transformation from waterfall-native development to devops-native software development is happening and it's real, and it's arguably in the early days, but it's no stopping that train now. As organizations continue to reconcile demand from board members and shareholders and CEOs, how do you remain relevant, how do you be, put yourself into a position where you're innovating with software fast enough to remain competitive? And that's a tremendous pressure, and it's driving transformational change like devops, and so as that demand for speed continues to grow, we think it only increases the appetite for opensource, and it creates opportunities for organizations like ours to basically automate how that opensource innovation happens. >> We do a lot of crowd chats, to surface the landscape and the common theme that comes up is, oh, your organizational mindset has to change, and were commenting, Peter and I were talking yesterday about, if your org's not set up, you'll have, what's the law? >> Conway's law. >> Conway's law, where the output matches the organization, but the bigger question is, Ford CEO got fired, he's been in the job for less than four years, he didn't have time to transform, so the question is, how does opensource help people transform faster, do you have any observations around that? Because that's the number one question we get is, okay, I need to configure resources to do that, and then the other theme that we're hearing, I'd love to get your reaction on is, "Oh my God, I'm going to lose my job through automation." And certainly Cisco has networking guys who are looking down the barrel of potentially being irrelevant if they don't make the network programmable, so this is, we've lived through cycles, is it the mainframe guys who kind of lose their jobs, kind of thing going on? Or is it a transformative opportunity for the people as well? >> Yeah, it's a great question, there's a lot there, but I think the notion that they say software eats the world, a different way of viewing is automation eats the world, and if you look at, we refer to the 100-10-1 rule, today, in every large IT organization, you got 100 developers for every 10 IT operations professionals for every one security professional. It's impossible for the application security professionals to maintain governance over 100 software developers. If the old way of doing something like application security in this world where we're talking about infinite supply of opensource, needs to be automated with machine intelligence, it needs to be scalable early, everywhere, and throughout the entire development lifecycle, and unless it's not, you're going to basically get some of the benefit of opensource, but not all of the benefit of opensource. >> I want to push you a little bit in this, Matt, because, one might argue, and I'm going to be a little bit apocryphal here for a second, but one might argue that we also have an infinite supply of different types of bubblegum. And at the end of the day, one can say, "Well, do we need another bubblegum?" And we may or may not, and yet we do. So the reason why I'm bringing that up is I want to square the infinite supply, which I don't disagree with, with the idea that, certainly our clients, especially the big data side, are still concerned about the fact that they can't find tooling, or combinations of opensource tooling, that can help them with their use case. And so as you think about, one of the things that intrigued me about what your company does is the idea of to what degree can you start with a business problem, use that business problem to do some design work, and then based on that, start finding the tooling that will be most appropriate for solving the problem. >> Yeah, it's a great question, and I think it goes back to this idea of automation, let's just give a real world use case, this is one of many, but if the demand for speed and innovation is what shareholders, boards, and CEOs are looking for out of their IT organizations and their development teams, then the first thing you do, in the theory of constraints is you look for where is the friction, right? So theory of constraints basically points to something like the process inside of a large financial organization that involves a developer requesting approval for using an opensource component. How long does that take? How many people are involved in that process? How many hours, how many dollars? Does it have to be that hard? Or can you basically create policy, and define policy, and build, effectively, a firewall that then automatically governs the flow of opensource, healthy opensource components, into the development lifecycle? With no human intervention at pace, right? And that's the idea of what we're doing when we talk about scaling opensource innovation early, everywhere, and across the entire development lifecycle, it starts at the perimeter, the moment the development requests the opensource component for use, it has to be automated, you can't afford to take three months to approve it, he needs it now! >> So let me turn that around, and see if this is a service that you are providing, or actually could provide. Given that you probably visibility into a lot of the problems that the developer's trying to solve, and therefore, their ability to check opensource in and out from a variety of different sources, are you also gaining visibility in the types of stuff that people can't find, and making that information available to the world about, here's some of the places where the opensource world could step up and do perhaps a better job of delivering that software? And I'm specifically thinking of the big data universe, because there's so many, for example, I got a client, big financial institution, who is tearing his hair out right now trying to come up with some standard components for complex machine-learning pipelines. Real, real hard job, a lot of different tools, they work together at some level, but they're not solving the problem, 'cause they're more focused on solving each other project's problem. Am I making this? >> You are making a lot of sense, and you should introduce us to your friend, because we would love to have a conversation and talk exactly how it is that you can create prescriptive architectures with opensource components to remove friction back to the theory of constraints concept, I mean, this process of innovation has to flatten out, and we are very narrowly focused on one particular piece of that pipeline, and it is the making sure that the development organization is benefiting from all of the greatness that opensource has to offer, but none of the bad, and you have to do that with automation. >> So just really quick, John, for those of you who don't know, the theory of constraints, to a computer science person, looks like Amdahl's law. Speed up that which you do most frequently, for those of you who've ever done computer design. >> Herbie the Boy Scout. >> Exactly, so it's speed up the thing that is causing the most pain. >> Right, right, right. >> So the question I have for you this, okay, given what you guys do, which is a great service, cutting edge, it's in the devops wheelhouse, so, what is, in your opinion, the most important metric for your customer's success, vis a vis devops, okay, I'm in, I've been hearing about this cloud native thing and devops, we've got to change to Agile, we wrote a manifesto, we changed the organization, what is the important metric that you think they should look for for success? >> You know, there's a lot of metrics, there's no one answer, but I'll give you a really great one, since you mentioned Red Hat earlier. Red Hat is an amazing company that has probably done more for the evolution of opensource than anyone. They have a phenomenal track record of managing RHEL, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux stack, upstream and downstream, to the point where today, they publicly tell that the Red Hat Summit just recently in Boston, I think it's a day or two meantime to repair for a zero-day vulnerability. They understand the supply chain for RHEL extremely well, and from our perspective, we are trying to create the same type of hygiene for custom software development that RHEL has long practiced in support of Red Hat, Red Hat has long practiced in support of RHEL, and so meantime to repair, for example. If a zero-day vulnerability hits, do you have a software bill of materials? Are you wondering where that particular component is? Do you even have the component? How many applications in production are affected? I mean, this is a real-world scenario, just two weeks ago, with Struts 2, how many organizations are still working today to figure out the answer to that question? You'd be surprised, it takes organizations months-- >> Peter: But this is more than a library. >> This is more than a library. >> So explain why it's more than a library. >> Struts 2? >> No, what you're doing. >> What we're basically doing is imagining a software supply chain, so step back and imagine a world where you could build software applications the same way that Toyota builds cars. You have Deming's principles, which says you basically take and source the components or the parts from the fewer suppliers, and you source the absolute best parts, and you track and trace the location of those parts to every step of the supply chain all the way into production, so that Toyota recently had to conduct an orderly and effective recall for four million Takata airbags. Right? In software terms, the next time you're basically sitting on top of a zero day, you need the equivalent of that orderly effective recall so you can in a matter of minutes, not months, patch that vulnerability. >> Hence why you use Goldratt's theory of constraints, so in many respects, this is a digital supply chain tool? >> We believe it's software supply chain automation. >> What about digital? Can I also think about how digital objects can be included in that? Again, going back-- >> Containers? >> Going back to the big data notion? >> Yeah, absolutely, this is, supply chain theory is well understood in a physical goods world, certainly, if you look at how physical goods move through a supply chain, and you come to grips with what's happening in digital transformation today and the evolution of devops and the proliferation of opensource, continuous integration, continuous delivery, speed is king, it's all going in the direction of a supply chain. >> So, when you have so much bubblegum, as Peter said, after it loses its flavor, you get a new piece, right? So, same with software. Final question for you. You guys are doing well, I can imagine that operationally, as coming to operational as opensource, you're a key component there, and that seems like a good opportunity. How early are you on that operational progress? I mean, you just get started, you're making some money, which is good. >> To be frank-- >> You're the customer on the journey, in other words, people realize, "I got a operation on," so they're just doing it, not having a checks and balance. >> Our business is really interesting in the sense that product market fit for any young company can take quite a while, and we're fortunate enough to have a CEO who is remarkably patient and savvy and experienced, his name is Wayne Jackson, for anybody knows, here at the Cisco conference, he was previously the CEO of Sourcefire, so an interesting connection there, but patience is key, and we're being rewarded right now because all of the trends that you guys have already talked about here, and everything we've talked about at Cisco DevNet point to a simple fact, which is that software is key to how companies will compete and win in the future, and as long as that's true, they're going to be looking for ways to improve innovation. Right now, our business is early, we're still creating budget in some situations, but that's increasingly changing, and I would say that you should expect our business to continue to grow-- >> So people are operationalizing opensource, and they're getting serious about some of these things-- >> We're seeing budget now that we didn't see last year, for operationalizing the flow of opensource into a devops-- >> Final, final question, since I want to get your take on the show, Cisco's moves here into this world, obviously, a good move in our opinion, I'm sure you agree, risky for them, a good move, progress, what should they do next? Your thoughts and reaction to DevNet Create, 'cause man, they got DevNet, a growing, robust community of Cisco developers. DevNet Create, a new opportunity, what's your thoughts? >> I've learned a lot, I'm glad to be here, and just saw some things yesterday that make it very, very clear that DevNet Create and what Cisco's doing with it is a great move, I mean, my personal belief is that developers are king, and as you expose core services, network services to developers, an innovation happens, and value gets created, and so they've done so much at the network layer for so many years, and if they're now exposing that network sort of innovation to developers, it'll be exciting to see what kind of innovation happens. >> Matt, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, I'm glad we got you in, great to meet you last night, and congratulations on your startup that you're working with, and growth, and been around the industry a long time, you've seen a lot of waves, and appreciate the insight here on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Appreciate you having me. >> Alright, we are live in San Francisco for exclusive coverage of Cisco's inaugural event DevNet Create, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, stay with us for more day two coverage after this short break. >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy and Planning for Cisco.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello everyone, welcome to day two of theCUBE's exclusive coverage Cisco Systems' DevNet Create, their inaugural event where they're put in the foray into the developer community and the open source community, really looking at DevOps, cloud-native, with data. Great move by Cisco. We're going to analyze it again here on the opening day and review yesterday a little bit and talk about what we think is happening here and give you the take on it, our angle, and extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris for day two, head of research for SiliconANGLE Media, also, general manager of Wikibon.com. Check out Wikibon.com, great research, some free, most of it. The good stuff is behind subscription firewall via client. Check it out. Your business will do great because of it. Peter, quick plug there. Get that out of the way. But, let's talk about Cisco. >> Thank you, John. >> We said yesterday and kind of played out Cisco has an opportunity to transfer and grow their core development community, DevNet, which is only three years old, is very robust, it's the heartbeat of Cisco right now, it's the core constituency for Cisco Systems. We're talking tier one elite networking guys, the plumbers, (laughs) pack it movers, whatever you want to call them, they've been designing networks from internet scale to today, everything from Voice over IP, you name it, they've been doing it and the network has been the center of the action and the data center. It's been the most critical asset for availability, operational support, and stable. But not very adaptive, not very agile (laughing) so, you know, now-- >> Almost by definition. >> And that's the purpose is the network guys drive the network and enable opportunities, but now that shift has happened. It's DevOps application developers are driving change to the network and the big conversation is what does it mean for Cisco? What does it mean for their communities? And we were saying that this is an opportunity to extend. We had the folks first from RedHat on yesterday talking about how when you have things come together, there's opportunities. There could be a collision or there could be an opportunity so, can use data science and computer science come together. That is now big data. That's changed the game in the world. Cisco now has DevOps and networks coming together. Applications and infrastructure. This is an opportunity for Cisco. Your take from yesterday, do you feel it? Do you think it's real? What's your take? >> Well, it's real. Digital transformation's happening and it's happening because people can now do things with data that they couldn't do before and they're starting to. So, that's the base of digital transformation, but the reality is, in a digital business, you're going to be by definition, almost inherently, highly networked. And your ability to move data where it needs to be when it needs to be there to whom it needs to be so that they can consume it, is emerging as an essential capability. But, you're not going to do that manually everywhere. You're not going to do it manually in the infrastructure, it's just too complex. And you're certainly not going to do it manually in the applications. And so, you're absolutely right. Being at that edge, being at that margin between how the network does things, how the network is the basis for very high-quality capability for distributing application componentry and how the data then flows over that network under control by applications is really where the next five years are going to be, a lot of the new value is going to created and it's great to see so many developers here that are actually creating code at a conference that's being sponsored and put forward by Cisco. >> The AppDynamics is certainly a force in function for Cisco. Great acquisition. They paid a pretty penny for it, but it could've been more had they gone public (laughing) given the market that's in. So, AppDynamics comes in, Cisco now has a cloud-native direction, still work to do, but they're doing it in a way that's not all Cisco. They're not coming in with Cisco washing, "Hey, this is Cisco." They're really doing it right. They come in, 90% of the sessions are not Cisco at all. It's all community-based. Is this a working strategy for Cisco? Do you see, and what would you advise them because this is important. They have to do this, in my opinion. I think it's a great move, personally. But now, the innovator's dilemma is DevNet's exploding. You've got DevNet's beautiful community, it's growing. It's growing really fast. But, now you have Devnet Create. What do they do? >> Well, so, let's talk about the AppDynamics acquisition just for a second. As with everything, in talking about a big company acquiring a company of any size, you always have observe and see how it's going to play out, but it's got a lot of potential. One of the places that I think it's got a significant potential is in that AppDynamics, as a technology, does a great job of capturing metrics about application performance on networks and as we think about how the market and technology is going to be reconfigured so that networks can be better, more planful, more predictive about what kinds of things the applications are going to need, being able to surface that kind of data is going to be really, really crucial to setting the next round of conventions and that will lead to the answer of your question. If we think about where the market needs to go, we have full stack developers, we have networks. They talk to each other, but they don't engage in a meaningful way as often as they should and I think it's time for us to start thinking about above layer six, that layer seven, start breaking down layer seven and saying, "Well, that's where that full "distributed stack development's going to take place," so that we can start seeing how data will be reused, application services will be reused, componentry will be reused across a variety of different use cases and having that kind of a new structure defined and laid out so that it is built on the presumption that there's going to be a significant network in a way, in the middle of it, I think is going to be really important. Doing everything with RESTful APIs is really important, but I think the industry needs to get a lot more intelligent about how we're really going to build these things and not just presume that there is no network connection. There is a network connection. There has to be one and we have to build that into the architectures that we put forward in the future. >> So, programmable infrastructure as the DevOps ethos, that's what Cisco's proposing and saying they will and are becoming. I get that. I think that's the winning formula, but let's take that concept with what you just said. You're implying that okay, with now distributed infrastructure at scale, with AppDynamics and other things, the notion of a developer changes 'cause now, Cisco folks and their developer community, now is not just by itself, it's integrating in with the rest of the communities. That changes the notion of full stack developer because when you go hire, "I need to hire "a full stack developer," this stops really at the database or how low does it go? So, I think, you brought this up yesterday, not on camera, but after when we were kind of talking, is that this is an opportunity to reconfigure the new definition of a full stack developer. >> Yeah, I think so, John, and you know, one of the things we did talk about was when Susie was on camera yesterday, was the idea that yes, we can, as we introduce software-defined infrastructure, the infrastructure becomes programmable and so, we now see Cisco, CLI-type people thinking about programming instead of just doing command line work. We see it happening in the server world and the CAD world, et cetera, so there's no question that that notion of programmable infrastructure is becoming very real. What we're talking about is stepping it up and having it be available to developers in new and different ways, but utilizing new conventions that start to suggest that for time purposes, latency purposes, security purposes, think about organizing your application componentry in new ways so that the underlying network and infrastructure can provide even more robust capabilities and more consistent capabilities so that we can see further future ways of integrating these things together. And I think that's where this ends up. >> Interesting point about these network opportunity is that Cisco and networking guys are not a stranger to services. Network services have been around for a while. When you look at what came out of yesterday's conversation and this is consistent with a lot of our CUBE interviews we've done with cloud-native players like Amazon and everyone else like AWS and VMware and everyone else, is everything's a service. So the question that I have for the Cisco world is can they move quickly enough to a services model in this notion of a new network engineer, network developer, infrastructure developer? How well can they get transitioned over while preserving their core base of developers? >> I think they have to, so, and it's a great question and we're not going to have the answer from here, but I think one of the things we do need to start seeing and we're starting to hear rumblings of it is the idea that the network has to become more intelligent in the context of the services that the application developer utilizes that run above it and so, the network doesn't necessarily have to be made explicitly or overtly available, but it has to be intelligent enough so that it can provide new capabilities, new service levels, new security levels, et cetera, in a response to the way the services are invoked in the patterns of operation. You know, in many respects, we talked about this a little bit yesterday, John, I think we used to have infrastructure defined by hardware and that served the industry okay for a long time and in the last 10 years, we started talking about software-defined infrastructure. So, we moved from hardware-defined infrastructure to software-defined infrastructure and that's kind of where we are today with the idea of the network becoming more programmable. I think as a consequence of big data and recognition where digital business is going, where data really is the asset and the idea that we're going to build applications and then find data, we're going to start with data and then, decide what we need to do with that data through big data and other types of things, we're literally talking about, in the next five years, about something that we might call data-defined infrastructure where the data, the characteristics of the data, the location of the data, the way it's used, the way it creates value for the business, having a dominant impact on how the infrastructure gets configured and I think that's a, has enormous opportunity for Cisco. >> Yeah, Pat Gelsinger talks about the software-defined use and that's still part of the VMware strategy. This is kind of where it's going so I'm going to put you on the spot. >> Peter: Uh-oh. >> After yesterday's interviews, what did you learn? What did you walk away that's either net new information to you or something that validates something that you've been thinking about or had been researching and analyzing? >> Well, the first thing I'll note and somewhat self-servicing is Wikibon is known for being at the vanguard. We tend to be a little bit out in front and imagining what, how technology disruption's going to play out in response to the new use cases and business issues and it's always good to talk to people that are smarter than I am to start validating some of our positions. So, we heard a lot of, yesterday, that was pretty strong validation at a technical level and a couple of big vendors that are along the lines of what we're talking about so that was very useful. >> What did they validate? What specifically-- >> well, this notion of, for example, the notion of data-defined infrastructure. The idea that data in the future is going to be seminal to thinking about how infrastructure's intelligent, really configured based on the needs described within the data and the metadata. So, we heard that from a couple different people. Another thing that we heard was that there is a, that this not just, that Cisco's vision here of having developers and network jocks coming together to thinking about what the impact's going to be ultimately on how we create business value out of technology is something that's not just a Cisco pipe dream. We had four or five partners on yesterday, including a number of them who are quite sizable, RedHat, for example, who trumpet and reflect and are promoting similar types of concepts. And the other thing that I heard and I'm particularly going back to the PubNub conversation we had, it's really nice to see technology that is been around for a while, that works well, be really reconceived to be able to do new and different things and in particular, PubNub was talking about a deterministic Pub/Sub network infrastructure. Very interesting stuff, it's going to be really important. And the reason why I think that's important is because the lessons that we've learned in the past are not necessarily dead because we're going through transformation. One of the biggest things that I think we all need to take away from this is that we think about a computer, we think about my iPad, your Mac, a Dell machine, whatever else is, we think about that as computer, we think about a server as a computer, but the reality is, if you think about what we're trying to do through conferences like this is internet-scale computing where we look at the entire internet as a computer. Any data, any process-- >> Network's critical. The network is the essential element of it because that's what weaves the whole thing together and I think what we learned yesterday is the lessons of the past, some are going to be gone and we have to get rid of them, but a lot of them have more to do with business models. This is, we're still talking about computers and we're still talking about computer science. >> Great summary of your learnings. I learned, just to wrap up our intro segment, I learned a couple things. Observations that just popped out at me, one is Cisco has a lot of women in tech, engineers, so that was a very cool thing for me 'cause we always look at our index and theCUBE interviews over the thousands of people interviewed and still, only 18% have been women interviews. (laughing) Do more. That's our kind of passion. But they're smart and they're really knowledgeable and it's really awesome to see great women being featured. Certainly, Susie's a rockstar leader as CTO. The other thing that I learned in talking to Abby Kearns, Executive Director at Cloud Foundry and Dan at Cloud Native Foundation is open source is changing significantly-- >> Peter: It's a fair point. >> And open source communities used to be, "My community, yeah, we're winning!" And it's always been a gamer mentality or win-lose and I think now, with the horizontally-scalable cloud, you're starting to see a cross-pollination of players cross-pollinating and participating in multiple horizontal communities that together, is an expansion of the overall open source ecosystem. I think this is a new next generation dynamic that takes the tier one open source position, which really, it's our generation. We're seeing open source become tier one, not tier two, it's a tier one software where people's business models are now a open source. MuleSoft, these companies going public, multiple IPOs since RedHat just recently going public, I think you're going to see more business models on open source and open source is changing and I think cloud is a big part of that. >> That's a great point, John. And the only thing I'd add to it, since it's a great summary, is that we also heard yesterday that the very notion of leadership in the open source universe is starting to change. As people come up with new business models, they're also exploring with new ways of providing leadership that doesn't violate the basic precepts of open source because if there has been an issue in the open source universe, it's been that open source does a great job of, if you have a convention and a statement about where the product is, like an operating system, open source can do an equal or better job of it. If you start talking about use cases and a lot of business uncertainty and how open source can sometimes spend its time looking at each other, looking at other projects and filling holes in between projects and not getting to that use case. >> We've known for a while, it's not new to us that open source where the innovation is and that's certainly seeing companies have their employees there and that's where recruiting is going on, as well. But, I'm being more specific. I think the changing game in the open source community is going to be one that's going to reflect the structure of the industry and I think Cisco jumping in with this event will change the game in the makeup of open source and the projects because if you believe that the network is programmable, and that the cloud is one big computer operating system, then you have to believe that that's going to be a new domino that drops and falls and I think the impact of Cisco making programmable internet, programmable networks to developers will have a cascading effect that will ripple on and I think-- >> So, you're predicting a lot of new open source projects that Cisco's helped to catalyze. >> I'm predicting some turmoil that could be positive. Again, is it a collision or is it-- >> Peter: Yeah, it is. >> Edges coming together? >> And it's okay. >> John: And that's the chaos theory, you've talked about that. >> It's a good prediction. >> So, I think it's a lot of good stuff. We'll be watching and covering and of course, play-by-play action on theCUBE. More day two coverage on theCUBE after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, after this short break, stay with us. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy & Planning for Cisco.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCube. Covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey welcome back everyone. Live here in San Francisco, exclusive coverage with theCube at Cisco's inaugural DevNet Create event. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris. We're breaking down the new foray into the open source world with a big presence. Cisco expanding their DevNet core developer classic program and creating an open source model with collaboration, 90% of that activity is non-Cisco, really a good formula. And to help us this down is Krish Subramanian, Principal Analyst at Rishidot Research, formerly of Red Hat, formerly of a start up that was recently sold. Can't talk about it because it's not released yet. Friend of theCube, Cube alumni, part of the Clouderati, going way back. Krish, we've seen a lot of the waves of how cloud has evolved from the early days. I remember when EngineYard was a startup, Haruku was a couple guys, we were having our meetups. >> And the AWS was still like people who weren't able to make money. >> They were poo-pooing the hell out of it. It was EC2 and S3 with a couple different, I mean RightScale did everything back then, so think about the changes. And now Cisco here with the formula, they have the right formula, I got to give them props for that, doing it right. They're not trying to come in and do a land grab and sort of, "Ahh, we're Cisco", throwing their elbows around. Really doing it right, your thoughts? >> Yeah, definitely, come back to what some other legacy companies tried to do. Cisco didn't try to jump in and say, "Hey, we are going to run public cloud, compete with Amazon", and sort of take them down. They sort of waited for right moment, they initially started with the InterCloud, which will go much further, but when IoT came into picture, they were there right for that and they were there taking advantage of that. And with the increasing focus on developers, they are going right to capture the minds of developers. Especially for IoT, that is critical for Cisco to go-- >> Well, I'm really glad you're on with Peter. We have two analysts here who know the industry up and down, from every dimension. Of course, I'll add my color, but I want to ask both of you guys a couple questions. One, do you think Cisco's making the right moves by coming out and really focusing on their core competency, which is the network? They also bought AppDynamics, so that is a big purchase. So, you got apps meets infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, which means infrastructure as code. You really can't have infrastructure as code unless Cisco gets behind it, they're the leader. So, with IoT looming, this seems like a good move for Cisco. What do you think? >> Yeah, definitely, they are going in the right direction, so it's really like IoT's still in the early stages and we have to wait and see how it is going to evolve, but Cisco is very persistent. Especially I like the AppDynamics acquisition because they are clearly telling the world that we understand that applications are the future and developers need the right tools if they are to develop their apps on Cisco infrastructure. And with the emphasis on programmability, Cisco is taking right steps towards capturing developer attention and I hope with successful events like this, they will be able to get there. >> Peter, I want to go to you for a second because we just found out, in talking to Suzy, I did not know this, but in your previous life, when you ran research at META Group, folks may not know what that was, it was a big research firm at the time, you did some really similar work around the infrastructure developer. >> Yeah >> Okay, and our comment was, "What is old is now new". I got a degree in operating systems and computer science and that seems to be the model. What is this notion of an infrastructure developer? It was mentioned in the keynote today. Does that exist in this new scenario? Do you see it being viable? It seems like the messaging is tight. What is your reaction to this notion? You've done a lot of work on that. >> Well, as a way of answering the question John, and I'll play off of something you just said, when we talk about the degree with which this is relevant to Cisco, here's what I say. Everybody's always looking for what is it that's different from today, relative to yesterday? And there's a lot of things that are different. One of the most important ones is that yesterday's computing industry emphasized a priority set of models about how you do things. So, if you thought about the network, the network had a modeled structure. You sat there and you designed a network to be as relevant to as many things as possible. Same with the database. You sat there and you designed the database to be as relevant to whatever notion of applications. When we start talking about the new world, now what we're discovering is the data is going to force a reconfiguration. That's what big data is. In many respects, it's non-structured, non-modeled data, but we still want to do analytics. Same thing with the network. We want the network to evolve and emerge, have emerging characteristics that allow us to do things that we never really anticipated when we first put this stuff down. And so, the thing that an infrastructure developer, at least as we conceived it, and we were way ahead and probably wrong for that reason, but the way we conceive it is someone has to take some degree of responsibility for starting to characterize, fill that gap, characterize the services in the infrastructure that need to be made available to application developers in a way that makes coherent and consistent sense so that an application written to an infrastructure, in fact, may become a service to another application at some point in time in the future, because they make consistent assumptions about where they operate within that margin between the application and the infrastructure. >> John: Does that environment exist today, in your opinion? >> It does in certain places. It does in certain places. I think the whole notion of containers is making, in Kubernetes for example, is making some very powerful presumptions about how applications are going to interact with each other in the future. Now, we had SOA, but we also talked about Conway's law, it just never happened because the structure of the organizations that were using SOA just guaranteed you end up with monolithic, crap applications anyway. >> Explain Conway's law real quick for people who didn't-- >> Yeah, Conway's law is, it's been mentioned in theCube a couple times, basically, it's a suggestion that the structure of the application is a reflection of the structure of the organization that created it. And so, if you have a silo-based application development organization that's looking at the application for the finance group, or the marketing group, you are going to get a structured, siloed-oriented application, no matter what underlying technology you use. And that's been that way forever. >> And so, Krish, I want to get your thoughts because let's take that to the next level. So, one of the benefits of cloud was horizontally scalable model. That really kind of, to me, was the big ah-ha moment around software. And with DevOps, which is now called cloud native, which is the same thing, infrastructures code was, hey, I'm not not an infrastructure person. I just want it to be available for me and help me configure it out and programmable, as Suzy was saying. Okay, so if you take what Peter's saying about data, you've lived through the infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, SAS wars or evolution, however you want to look at it. And, now you see that kind of coalescing into SAS and infrastructure and PAS kind of folding away and kind of becoming less of a contentious conversation. But, now that same thing's happening with data, we believe. I mean I think, maybe he may disagree, but now data's now the new data layer. What's your thoughts on that? Because now, if you inject data into what was the old cloud stack, new things are really possible. >> Yeah, the thing is, data brings in a new dimensionality to what we are seeing right now. Everything from infrastructure to application, everything requires a mindset change in terms of seeing them as services. So, even if it is a physical hardware you are dealing with, you have to make it more service-like by putting an API in front of it. So, it's changing the way how we consume these services. But, data is the one that is bringing business value to customers. When you make data easily, sort of like, inter operate with the services, let's say call it, for lack of a better term, a services ocean kind of IT model you have in your enterprise. So, when you offer to bring data into it, it offers you a lot of opportunities which didn't exist in the past. It opens up new avenues in which you could manipulate data, make sense out of it and probably get more value than what you were getting in the past. >> What's interesting, if you bring micro services, if you think about Docker and Kubernetes, as you were saying, and you bring data now into the equation and the notion of microservices, you can apply all that microservices knowledge to data. That's what you were saying, from what I hear. Or concepts of-- >> Sort of like you will bring data close to take, earlier as Peter pointed out, data was in silos, representative of the organizational structure. So, by taking a more services approach and spreading the services across these siloed, PAS, siloed organization, you are bringing the entire organization into one single umbrella, sharing the data and thereby benefiting much more than what they were getting in the past. >> So John, in the opening, one of the things we talked about, and I'll repeat it here because he's probably going to see it and I'd love to hear your comments on it, is that we went to hardware-defined networking. And then we went to software-defined networking. And, Wikibon's working on a proposition and I'm sure we'll find reasons why it's not going to play out, but again, I'd like to hear your position, is what I'll call data-defined infrastructure. So, we were on theCube last week at Informatica and we heard a lot about the role that metadata's going to play in discovery of data resources and whatnot. I can imagine adding metadata when we start talking about dependencies and time and location and things that are relevant to how a network or how an infrastructure might configure itself to serve the data, becoming a feature of the programmability of the underlying infrastructure so that we end up, in five years, we do talk about data-defined infrastructure. Just as today, we're talking about software-defined infrastructure, where the infrastructure, literally, responds to the needs of the data because that, ultimately, is the most flexible way of think about this. What do you think? >> Yeah, I fully agree with you. In fact, data brings in a new dimensionality to the equation where applications, it's a morph based on what is there in the data. So, on-the-fly, the infrastructure needs to be modified. So, data sort of brings in a new way of doing infrastructure from what we have done in the past. I fully agree with the role of data in that and how, through the application, that influences how we deal with infrastructure. It does change completely. >> All right, so I got to ask you guys a question. Journeys, is journey to DevOps, journey to digital transformation, certainly has a lot of cloud, has a lot of open source involved with it. We're seeing the Ford CEO get fired, he hasn't been on the job for four years, right? So, you guys both work with end users and advise them, so what's your advise to CXOs where, hey the clock now is, I thought four years was short. It really should be seven to 10 on the transformation scale, but people are getting axed in their third year, so they got to show results. How does an executive make all this stuff happen in such a short time? Or should they just reset expectations? >> When the executive comes in, he, or she, not only should look at their core business, they should also think that they are a technology business and change the mindset completely. That mindset change needs a push from the top that's going to accelerate the change down the lane and I think the executive should think that they are becoming a CEO, or CXO, of a technology company, rather than a manufacturing company or a automobile company kind of thing. >> I think that's true, but look, we haven't studied what happened at Ford in detail because I'm sure there's some subtleties in there that we just don't fully understand, but on the surface, it sounds like he might have gotten a little bit of a raw deal, just from the pure standpoint of-- >> Well the stock was down 39%, so my guess is total Wall Street hatchet job, but -- >> Peter: Exactly. >> We don't know a lot of the politics, but Val Bercovici, who was on earlier, who has a lot of experience in organizations that net app since 97, or late 90s, brought an interesting point, you were saying earlier. Tesla creates a car that's a service. And so, to me, I hate to use the cliche, "Everything as a service", but essentially, that's what software's going to. So, where you make up a day, that's why I'm kind of poking at the data thing because I think you're on to som-- >> But it's the end of the day, Tesla still has to have a shop that bends metal, there's still some car manufacturing things that have to happen. And, in many respects, whether the old CEO is saying, well the value proposition is, someday this autonomous vehicle is going to happen, but right now, we still got to build cars that can compete in the world market. There's a lot of subtleties here. There are-- >> Yeah, but Tesla does upgrade with software over the network. >> For an 80 to $100,000 price point and there's about four billion people that are going to buy cars in the next five years that may, or may not, be able to buy a 80,000 to $100,000 car. So anyway, coming back to your core point, I think what it really means is that if you're in a situation where you don't have visibility in a how, some of these new, digital approaches are going to create value for your business, you're doomed. So, I think the first thing you got to do is you got to be very explicit. This is how digital technology's going to create value for my business, that's number one. And, be able to articulate that to, virtually, anybody that's capable of understanding it, including Wall Street. But, to do that, you have to step back and say, and what is it about that digital technology that's going to create value for my business. And the thing that's going to do it, or not, is the data. >> And the asset configuration around, the work around the assets. >> Especially the asset configuration, as it's defined by the data. And, increasingly, there's an economics terms, what we're going to see happen over the next 10 years is the asset specificities are going to go down dramatically. In other words, the ability to which, or the degree to which an asset can only be configured to a specific purpose. Software's going to change that dynamic dramatically. And that, in many respects, is one of the fundamental, underlying things that's going on here. But, at the end of the day, you have to say, what role is data going to play in my business? How am I going to articulate that role by saying that I'm going to incorporate digital in this way? And then, put in place a plan that demonstrates that you're competent about some of these things. And, if your shareholders don't like it, they're not going to like it from anybody, not just you. >> Krish, I want to get your thoughts on the Cloud Native Compute Foundation. Why it's so successful. Why, in your opinion, do you think, there just booming with vendors, a lot of cash infusion, a lot of activity, projects went from one, three, 10. We had Dan on earlier, a lot of growth in the cloud native. And then, also, Kubernetes as a, kind of as an emerging, really interesting dynamic, vis-a-vis multicloud. So why cloud native is so popular and the impact of Kubernetes. >> Cloud native is popular because of late, developers are understanding that the role we are building applications is not going to work in cloud. When containers came into picture, that really made it easy for developers to develop cloud native apps. It got them to take advantage of the more distributed nature of the underlying infrastructure. So, the containers are the main reason why cloud native has become the household term, even in the enterprises. That could be one of the reason why Cloud Native Foundation is popular. Because they came at the right time to host all these development projects and evangelize with the developers and take steps in that. As far as Kubernetes is concerned, it worked at Google's CE. If it can work at Google's CE and then solve Google's problem, it should be able to help-- >> If it's good for Google, it's good for me. That's their strategy. >> And also, people are slowly realizing that as more and more enterprises go to cloud, they are realizing that going with a single cloud provider may not solve all their problems because different cloud providers have different set of services. So, they want to take advantage of all that. But, they want a single pane of glass to manage everything. Kubernetes is this general to be that at the cloud-- >> Krish, thanks for coming on. Peter, thanks for the comments, I'll just wrap up the analyst segment by saying, in my opinion, I think Cisco's making a good move here because, to your point about Google and Kubernetes is, and that's one of many examples of great software being contributed to open source. And open source, for all the times I've been involved with it since I was in college, is this more great software coming to the table now than ever before and that's creating great innovation. So, combined with the cloud and cloud native and Kubernetes, a perfect storm of innovation is coming. And it's coming, not from vendors, it's coming from open source. And, so the smart vendors are putting their toe in the water and really figuring it out. And again, the-- >> Peter: It is coming from vendor support though. >> Well the vendors are smart by putting their people in open source as a proxy for contribution. That's the open source model. That, to me, is the new R&D. It's a new innovation strategy, coupled with some proprietary R&D. Not saying they should be going all open source. >> I agree with it completely. In fact, I would even go one step further and say open source is completely disrupting the traditional enterprise software in modern business. Think about someone like Capital One putting critical software as open source and disrupting all the vendors in the space, so it's-- >> Well, let's continue the conversation in studio or tomorrow. Again, open source is horizontally scaling as well. Great stuff, great projects. More exclusive coverage from the inaugural event for Cisco's DevNet Create after this short break. (up-tempo music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the senior director of strategy--

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our live coverage from theCUBE exclusive, two days with Cisco's inaugural DevNet Create event. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host, Peter Burris, who's the general manager of Wikibon.com, and head of research for SiliconANGLE Media. We're talking with Susie Wee, who is the vice president and CTO of Cisco's DevNet, the creator of DevNet, the developer program that was started as grassroots, now a full-blown Cisco developer program. Now starting another foray into the cloud-native open-source community with this new event, DevNet Create. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, John. >> Thanks for having us. We love going to the inaugural events because they're always the first, and you know, being bloggers, and media, you got to be first. First news, first comments. >> Susie: Always first. >> Always first, and we're the only media here, so thank you. >> Susie: Thank you. >> So tell us about the event (Susie chuckles). You're the host and the creator, with your team. >> Susie: Yes. >> How did this come together, why DevNet Create? You have DevNet, this event is going extremely well, tell us. >> Awesome, so, yeah, so we have DevNet, we've had DevNet for about three years. It was actually exactly three years ago that we had our first DevNet Zone, a developer conference at Cisco Live, three years ago. And there, we felt like we pretty squarely hit... We've had successes there, we've had a pretty strong handle on our infrastructure audience, but what we see is that there's this huge transition, transformation going on in the industry, with IoT and cloud, that changes the definition of how applications meet infrastructure. And so this whole thing with, you know, applications, what is an application? What is the infrastructure? The infrastructure is now programmable, how can apps interact? It opens up a whole new world, and so what we did was we created DevNet Create as a standalone developer conference focused on IoT and cloud to focus on that transformation. >> And a lot of industry trends kind of going on, and moves you're making, it's the company, or you, Cisco is making, AppDynamics, big acquisition, kind of speaks to that, but also, there's always a natural progression for Cisco to have moving up the stack with software, but IoT gives you guys a unique opportunity with the network concept. So, making it network programmable, infrastructure as code, as some say in the DevOps world, is the ethos. >> Absolutely. >> How do you guys see yourselves engaging with the community, and what are some of the plans, and what's some of the feedback you're getting here at the event? >> So what we've done here at the event is that, you know, as you've seen from the channel is that, our content is 90% from the community, maybe 10% from Cisco, 90% from the community, because we believe it is all about the ecosystem. It's about how applications meet the infrastructure, it's the systems people are building together. And there's a lot of movement in developing these technologies. We don't know the final form of how an IoT app... Like, who's going to build the app, who's going to build the users, who's going to run the service, who's going to run the infrastructure? It's all still evolving, and we think that the community needs to come together to solve this to make the most of the opportunity. And so that's what, really, this is all about. And then, we think it actually involves learning the languages, making sure that the app folks know the language of the infrastructure folks. They don't have to become experts in it, but just knowing the language. Understand what part's programmable, what part's not, what benefit can you derive from the infrastructure. And then, by really having knowledge of what you can get across, and creating a forum for people to get together to have this conversation, we can make those breakthroughs. >> So just a clarification, you said that 90% of the sessions are non-Cisco, or from the community, and only 10% from Cisco? >> Susie: That's right. >> Is that by design? >> That is absolutely by design. So, when we have the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live, that's all about all of Cisco's products, platforms, APIs, bringing in the community to come and learn about those, but DevNet Create was really, squarely for IoT and app developers, IoT app developers, cloud developers, people working on DevOps, to look at that intersection. So we didn't go into all the gory details of networking, like we very much like to do, but we were really trying to focus on, "What's the value to application developers, "and what are the opportunities?" >> Well, it's interesting because, Susie, we're in the midst, as you said, of a pretty significant transformation, and there's a lot of turbulence, not only in business and how business conceives of digital technology, and the role it's going to play, the developer world, cloud-this, cloud-that, different suppliers, but one of the anchor points is the network, even though the network itself is changing, >> It is. >> in the midst of a transformation, but it's a step function. So, you go from, on the wireless, go outside, 1G to 3G, to 5G, et cetera, that kind of thing, but how is the developer going to inform that next step function in the network, the next big transformation in the network, and to what degree is this kind of a session going to really catalyze that kind of a change? >> Absolutely. So, what happens is, you're right, it's something that we all know, all app developers know, and actually, every person in the world knows, the network is important. The network provides connectivity, the network is what provides Internet, data, and everything there. That's critical to apps, but the thing that's been heard about it is it's not programmable. Like, you kind of get that thing configured, it's working now, you leave it. Don't touch it. >> It's still wires. In the minds of a lot of people, (Susie laughs) it's still wires, right? >> It is, it's wires, or even if it's wireless, once you can get it configured, you leave it. You're not playing with it again, it's too, kind of, dangerous or fragile to change it. >> Because of the sensitivity to operational... >> Because of the sensitivity to operations. The big change that's happening is the network is becoming programmable. The network has APIs, and then, we have things like automation and controller-based networking coming into play, so you don't actually configure it by going one network device at a time, you feed these into a controller, and then, now you're actually doing network-wide commands. That takes out the human error, it actually makes it easy to configure and reconfigure. And when you have that ability to provision resources, to kind of reset configurations, when you can do that quickly through APIs, you suddenly have a tool that you never had before. So let me give you an example. So let's say that you're in a building, you have your badging systems, your automated elevators, you have your surveillance cameras, you want to put out a new security system with surveillance cameras. You don't want to put that on the same network segment as your vending machines. You have a different level of security required. Could put in a work order to say... >> Unless you're really worried about who's stealing from the vending machines. (all laugh) >> So what you can do, now that it's programmable, is use infrastructure as code, is basically say, "Boom, give me a new network segment, "let me drop these new devices onto it, "let the programmable network automatically create "a separate network segment that has "all of these devices together." Then you can start to use group-based policy to now set, you know, the rules that you want, for how those cameras are accessed, who they're accessible by, what kind of data can come in and out of it. You can actually do that with infrastructure as code. That was not a knob that app developers had before. So they don't need to become networking experts, but now they have these knobs that they can use to give you that next level of security, to give you that next level of programmability, and to do it at the speed that an app developer needs. >> So I was talking to Steve Post-y earlier this morning, and he's from Redhead, he's a lead developer, he's not a network guy, he's self-proclaimed, "Hey, I'm not a networking person, I care about apps," and he's a developer, and he brought up something interesting I want to get your thoughts on. I think you're onto something really big with your vision, which is why we're so pumped about it, and he brought up an example of ecosystem's edges, and margins of the edge of these, that when they come together, creates innovation opportunities. And he used the example of data science meets cloud. And what he was using in particular was the example of most data people in the old days were data jocks, they did data, they did things, and they weren't really computer scientists, but as those two communities came together, the computer scientist saying, "Hey, I don't know about data," and the data guy's like, "Hey, you know about algorithms," "I know about algorithms," so innovation happened when that came together. What you're doing here, if I got this right, is you're saying, "Hey, DevNet's doing great," from a Cisco perspective, "but now this whole new creative innovation world "in the cloud is happening in real time. "Bring 'em together, "so best of Cisco knowledge to the guys who don't want to be (chuckles) "experts in that can share information." Is that kind of where this is going? >> Yeah, that's exactly where it's going, and same example, earlier in my career, I was working on sending video over networks, and then you had the networking people doing networking, you had the video people doing video compression, but then video networking, or streaming media, kind of, oh, you can put, you know, your knowledge of the compression and the network all together, so that kind of emerged as a field. The same thing, so, so far, the applications, and the infrastructure, and IT departments have been completely separate. You would just do the best you can, it was the job of IT to provide it, but now, suddenly there's an opportunity to bring these together. And it's, again, it's because the infrastructure's becoming programmable, and now it has knobs and can work quickly. So, yes, this is kind of new ground. And things could continue the way they are, right? And it's okay, we're getting by, but you just won't be realizing the potential of the real kind of... >> Well, open-source has clearly demonstrated that the collective intelligence of communities can really move fast, and share, and it's now tier one, so you're seeing companies go public, MuleSoft, Cloudera, and the list goes on and on. So now you have the dynamic of open-source, so I got to ask you the question, as you go out with DevNet Create, as this creation, the builders that are out there building apps are going to have programmable networks, how do you see this next leg of the journey? Because you have the foray now with DevNet Create, looks good, really well done, what's next? >> What's next is going on and making the real instances that show the application and infrastructure synergy. So let me just give you a really simple example of something that we're doing, which is that Apple and Cisco have had a partnership, and this partnership is coming together in that we have iOS developers who are writing mobile apps. So you have your mobile apps people are writing, we have iOS 10, your app developers are writing these apps. But everybody knows you run into a situation where your app gets congested on the network. Let's say that we're here in Westfield Mall, and they want to put out an AR/VR app, and you want that traffic to work, right? 'Cause if the mall wants to offer an AR/VR service, it takes a lot of bandwidth to get that data through, but through this partnership, what we have is an ability we have to use an iOS 10 SDK to, basically, business optimize your app so that it can run well on a Cisco infrastructure. So basically, it's just saying, "Hey, this is important, "put it in the highest QoS (John laughs) level setting, "and make your AR/VR work." So it's just having these real instances where these work together. >> I mean, I used to be a plumber back in my day when I used to work at HP, and I know how hard it is, and so I'm going to bring this up, because networks used to be stable and fragile/brittle, and then that would determine what you could do on top of it. But there are things like DNS, we hear about DNS, we hear about configuration management, setting ports, and doing this, to your point, I want dynamic provisioning or policy at any given moment, yet the network's got to be ready to do that. >> You don't want to submit a work order for that. (laughs) >> You don't want to have to say, "Hey, can you provision port, whatever, "I need to send a bunch of bandwidth." This is what we're talking about when we say programmable infrastructure, just letting the apps interface with network APIs, right? >> Absolutely, and I think that, you heard earlier, that with CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, just announced CNI, so that what they're doing is now offering an ability to take your kind of container orchestration and take into consideration what's going on in the network, right? So if this link is more congested than that, then make sure that you're doing your orchestration in the right ways, that the network is informing the cloud layer, that the cloud platform's informing the network, so that's going to be huge. >> But do you think, I'm curious, Susie, do you think that we're going to see a time when we start bringing conventions at layer 7 in the network, so we start to parse layer 7 down a little bit, so developers can think in terms of some of those higher-level services that previously have been presentation? Are we likely to see that kind of a thing? As the pain of the network starts to go away, and an explicit knowledge of layer 1-6 become a lot less important, are we going to see a natural expansion at layer 7, and think about distributed data, distributed applications, distributed services, more coherence to how that happens on an industry-wide basis? What do you think? >> Yeah, so let's see, I don't know if I have a view on which layers go away, or which layers compress... >> But the knowledge, the focal point of those? >> But the knowledge, absolutely. So it comes into play, and what happens is, like, what is the infrastructure? In the Internet of things, things are a part of your infrastructure. That's just different. As you're going to microservices, applications aren't applications, they're being written as microservices, and then once you put those microservices in containers, they can move around. So you actually have a pretty different paradigm for thinking about the architecture of applications, of how they're orchestrated, what resources they sit on, and how you provision, so you get a very new paradigm for that. And then the key is... >> But they're inherently networked? >> That's right, that's right. It's all about connectivity, it's all about, you know, they don't do anything without the network. And we're pushing the boundaries of the network. >> These aren't function calls over memory like we used to think about things, these things are inherently networked. We know we have network SOAs, and service levels, and whatnot... >> Susie: There is. >> It sounds like we have... I was wondering, here, at this conference, are developers starting to talk about, "Geez, I would like to look at Kubernetes "as a lower-level feature in layer 7," >> Susie: They are. (laughs) >> "where there's a consistent approach to thinking about "how that orchestration layer is going to work, "and how containers work above that, "because I don't have to worry about session anymore, I don't have to worry about transmission." >> Susie: Absolutely. >> That goes away, so give me a little bit more visibility into some of that higher-level stuff, where, really, the connectivity issues are becoming more obvious. >> Absolutely, and an interesting example is that, you know, we actually talked about AppDynamics in the keynote, and so, with AppDynamics, what kind of information can you get from these bits of code that are running in different places? And it comes into where we have the Royal Bank of Scotland, who's saying, "What's my busiest bank branch "where people are doing mobile banking in the country?" And they're like, "Well, how do I answer that question?" And then you see that, oh, someone has their mobile phone, they take an app, then you actually break it down to how is that request, that API, how is that being, kind of, operated throughout your network. And when you take a look, you say, "Okay, well, this called this "piece of code that's running here. "This piece of code used this API to talk to this other service, to talk to this other," you can map that out, get back the calls of, "Hey, this is how many times this API has been called, "this is how many times this service has been called, "this is the ones that are talking to who," then they came up with the answer, saying that our busiest bank branch is the 9 a.m. Paddington Train Station. >> And that's a great example, because now you gain visibility >> Exactly >> into where the dependencies are, which even if you don't explicitly render it that way, starts to build a picture of what the layers of function might look like based on the dependencies and the sharing of the underlying services. >> That's right, and that's where you're saying, like, "What? The infrastructure just gave me business value (John laughs) "in a very direct way. "How did that happen?" >> John: That's a huge opportunity for Cisco. >> So it's a big... >> Well, let's get in the studio and let's break down the Kubernetes and the containers, 'cause Docker's here, a lot of other folks are here. We've had, also, Abby Kearns, the executive director of Cloud Foundry. We've had the executive director from the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, Dan was here, a lot of folks here in the industry kind of validating >> Yeah, Craig was here. >> your support. Sun used to have an expression, the network is the computer, but now, maybe Chuck Robbins should go for network is the app, or the app is the network, (Susie laughs) I mean, that's what's happening here. The interplay between the two is happening big time. >> It is happening here, yeah. Just every element, every piece of code, what we saw is that this year, developers will write 111 billion lines of code. You think about that, every piece of... >> Peter: That we know about. (chuckles) >> That we know about, there's probably more. (chuckles) and all of that, you're right, these are broken up into pieces that are inherently networked, right? They have data, it's all about data and information that they're sharing to give interesting experiences. So this is absolutely a new paradigm. >> Well, congratulations on your success. What a great journey, I know it's been a short time, but I noticed after our in-studio interview, when you came in to share with us, the show, as a preview, Chuck Robbins retweeted one of the tweets. >> Susie: He did. >> And so I got to ask you, internally at Cisco, I know you put this together kind of as a entrepreneurial inside the company, and had support for that, what is the conversation you have with Chuck and the executive team about this effort? Because they got to see a clear line of sight that the value of the network is creating business value. What are some of the internal conversations, can you give us a little bit of color without giving away all the trade secrets? >> Yeah, well, internally, we're getting huge support. Chuck Robbins checks in on this, he actually has been checking in saying, "How's it going?" Rowan Trollope sending, "Hey, how's it going? "I heard it's going great." >> Did he text you today? >> Chuck did a couple days ago. >> John: Okay. (chuckles) >> And then Rowan, today, so, yeah, so we have a lot of conversation. >> Rowan's a CUBE alumni, Chuck's got to get on theCUBE, (Susie laughs) Rowan's been on before. >> Yeah, so they're all kind of checking in on it. We have the IoT World Forum going on in parallel, in London, so, otherwise, they would be here as well. But they understand... >> John: There's a general excitement? This is not a rogue event? >> There's huge excitement. >> This is not, like, a rogue event? >> It's not, it's not, and what happens is... They also understand that we're talking about bringing in the ecosystem. It's not just a Cisco conversation, it is a community... >> Yeah, you're doing it right, you're not trying to take over the sandbox. You're coming in with respect and actually putting out content, and learning. >> Putting out content, and really, it's all about letting people interact and create this new area. It's breaking new ground, it's facilitating a conversation. I mean, where apps meet infrastructure, it's controversial as well. Some people should say, "They should never meet. "Why would they ever meet?" (Susie and John laugh) >> So, we do a lot of shows, I was telling Peter that, you know, we were at the first Hadoop Summit, second Hadoop World, with Cloudera, when they were a small startup, Docker's first event, CubeCon's first event, we do a lot of firsts, and I got to tell you, the energy here feels a lot like those events, where it's just so obvious that (chuckles) "Okay, finally, programmable infrastructure." >> Well, I'll be honest, I'm relieved, because, you know, we were taking a bet. So, you know, when I was bouncing this idea off of you, we were talking about it, it was a risk. So the question is, will it appeal to the app developers, will it appeal to the cloud developers, will it appeal overall? And I'm very relieved and happy to see that the vibe is very positive. >> Very positive. >> So people are very receptive to these ideas. >> Well, you know community, give more than you take has always been a great philosophy. >> I'm always a little paranoid and (John laughs) nervous but I'm very pleased, 'cause people seem to be really happy. There's a lot of action. >> There are a lot of PCs with Docker stickers on them here. (John laughs) >> There are. (laughs) There are, yes, yes. We have the true cloud, IoT, we have the hardcore developers here, and they seem to be very engaged and really embracing... >> Well, we've always been covering DevOps, again, from the beginning, and cloud-native is, to me, it's just a semantic word for DevOps. It's happening, it's going mainstream, and great to see Cisco, and congratulations on all your work, and thanks for including theCUBE in your inaugural event. >> Susie: Thank you. >> Susie Wee, Vice President and CTO at Cisco's DevNet. We're here for the inaugural event, DevNet Create, with the community, two great communities coming together. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, stay tuned for more coverage from our exclusive DevNet Create coverage, stay with us. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director of strategy.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2017 brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, we are here live in San Francisco for theCUBE's exclusive two days of coverage of Cisco's new inaugural event called DevNet Create. An extension of their classical developer group DevNet, DevNet Create really going into the ethos of DevOps, the infrastructruous code targeting cloud-native and app developers, the collision between applications and infrastructure. A new direction for Cisco, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris. Our next guest is Bhavana Srines- >> Bhavana: Srinivas. >> Srinivas, solutions architect at PubNub, which provides real-time pubs. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, it's great to be here and talk to you guys. >> So, PubNub, you couldn't get PubSub but it relates. Explain what you guys do real quick. >> Yeah, so what PubNub is is it provides real-time infrastructure as a service. So we realized that a lot of people were trying to build these real-time, always-on applications wherein when something happens in real life, you want that message or event to be translated to several of your friends or other users instantly. So, everyone is trying to build a real-time app like, say, a taxi dispatcher like Lyft or for example, a chat application where if I send a message my friends need to receive it instantly. Anyone trying to build these kind of real-time applications were building the infrastructure before they even got to the best part, which is their business logic. So, we decided that we will provide that infrastructure, we'll provide that plumbing. We'll build a global distributed network for all of these app developers to build their always-on applications. So, what we do is provide this real-time, bidirectional communication between devices in a very scalable manner and it's very, it focuses on real-time communication. >> And the key there is that most apps are mobile, you require this so you want to get them accelerated because, let's face it, most apps don't make it, right? So why build all the plumbing? >> Bhavana: Right. >> Focus on getting to figuring out the best app experience. >> Exactly, so it's for mobile, web, and even for IoT devices because everyone now wants to talk to each other. You're not going to let that gradual sit by itself, you want to connect it. So, like you said, it's meant to go to market quickly. Like you said, not every company has the resources or the time and the effort to put in to building this infrastructure, so why don't we provide this as a service? So now they're focusing on their business logic and try and make that app look pretty. >> So you're clearly in the world of cloud-native, which really is pure cloud, mostly startups. Because why have a data center? If you're a startup, I mean anyone that does a startup these days, if you have data center you're either crazy or you have so much case you just want to spend it. Why would you want to do it? You just go right to the cloud. >> Right, right, right, so we call ourselves more of a network because we're not... Think of it as a CDN but for real-time data. It's not longer static files- >> Peter: CDN is smaller messages deterministic performance. >> Exactly, exactly, you nailed it. So, what we're- >> John: You nailed it. >> Peter: I'm the man! (laughter) >> All right, so talk to me about where your use cases are. Give us some examples of customers and some specific apps that are on the network. >> For sure, so, if you take eBay for instance. They use PubNub for buyer-seller chat. So, you go on eBay, you want to talk to that buyer before you actually buy that thing. So, that chat application is powered by PubNub. Or for instance, you go to Logitech and then you want to control all these devices in your house, and PubNub is what enables that from your mobile phone to all the devices in your house. That is PubNub in play there. Or, if for instance, Lyft uses us for to see where exactly the driver is in real-time. So you're able to see every instantly. So, it's such a low-lying infrastructure that we play in almost 35 different industries. Whether it's real-time chat or taxi dispatch, multiplayer game, like Pocket Gems uses us. That's where it's real-time at it's core, right? So, you have two screens, people are playing a game. You want to see what the other person is doing, right? That's the essence of a multiplayer game. And so you can imagine how important it is to be real-time in such a use case, and that's where PubNub fits in. >> But just so we're clear, we're not talking about scada kinds of, system control kinds of things. Low-level IoT protocols, we're talking about a machine that serve human types of speeds. >> Bhavana: Exactly. >> A few hundred milliseconds, that kind of stuff. >> Exactly, exactly, so we're protocol, we call ourselves protocol agnostic. So, as long as a device can speak ECP it can understand PubNub. So, all you're dealing with is that high-level application level APIs. >> Peter: So you're still layer seven? >> Yes, very much layer seven. >> Peter: That's important. >> Yeah, but then the way we provide that layer seven API is by building out this very robust network. >> All right, so explain to us how you guys play with microservices because you're doing a topic on, Always-on Apps are Driving Microservices to the Edge. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so far you understood that PubNub's almost like a message pipeline between devices. If you have a message to throw out, PubNub will route it for you anywhere in the world. So then we decided that people are sending all these small bits of data through our network, but let's do something with that data. So, maybe if there's a chat application and people are talking to each other, maybe you want to translate it in-stream. So you put in a function there on the PubNub network that says, "Hey, if my destination is going to a "Spanish-speaking person, translate it." Or if I want to do sentiment analysis because I have a customer support kind of app, data's flowing between an agent and a customer, then let's do some sentiment analysis on it. So, what we added to this humongous network is the ability to put small pieces of logic on it. So that it acts on the data flowing though the network. And so it becomes easy to spin up these microservices through PubNub and that's what I'm going to be talking about. So it's, yeah-- >> John: So it's a brand new innovation. >> Bhavana: Sorry? >> A new innovation opportunity for you guys-- >> Bhavana: Exactly. >> To apply logic into a data stream while it's in motion. >> Of course, yes, so we recently even did have a BLOCK, we call this BLOCK, event handlers. So, we have a BLOCK with Cisco Spark. So if you wanted to do any kind of collaboration using that Cisco Spark, you can now send data through PubNub and instantly, in real-time it will sync up with Cisco Spark. >> So, Bhavana I got to get your perspective on something. We talk to a lot of enterprises and you're involved with a lot of cutting edge companies. Microservices, cloud-native, they're doing cutting edge stuff. They don't have time to be bothered with old-fashioned stuff because they have no baggage. There's no legacy, a lot of these enterprises have legacy environments, they're trying to be relevant, and they're looking to design great apps. Is there a pattern that you've seen or observation that you've noticed on these successful new, emerging companies that could be an opportunity for someone to look at and say, "Hmm, I should to more of that." What's the trend? >> (laughs) That's a loaded question. But we talk to a lot of small and medium businesses and also a lot of enterprise level companies. But then, it's just that the sales cycles are much slower. You can't go to a company and say that, "Hey, I know you're building a technical product. "Speed up your development process," right? So it's up to them to do that. So with enterprises at least they have the resource and time to do so. But, like you said, they have a lot of legacy systems. So, it's hard to tear that down and-- >> John: Build new. >> Build new stuff that you have, which might be more optimized but we try to make it work. So we're trying to now, like I said, if you're within the PubNub eco-system, you can use our BLOCKS but then everyone understands https. So we've now included a BLOCKs endpoint, where if you just dock http, you can get in to the PubNub network. So ways to use our network using their infrastructure. So we're trying to make this network accessible for anyone, irrespect of whether they use-- >> John: So integrate easily into these older legacy environments. >> Bhavana: Exactly. >> Well, but so one of the places where at least PubSub initially started was the idea that you could have a published without having to know who the clients were. >> Bhavana: Right, right, right, right. >> So you anticipate, does PubNub anticipate that you're actually going to be in a position to say, I as a real-time device, who has a real-time service, can put something into PubNub and then devices out there can subscribe to it? So a device manufacturer may sell something, it takes advantage of that centralized service, but have it operate in a deterministic, high-quality high-reliability way? Is that kind of the direction you're taking? >> Yeah, but at the end of the day, someone has to build an application. >> Peter: Sure. >> So for instance, even in Insteon, they use PubNub. They integrate PubNub within their devices and they're now selling it at Best Buys and whatnot. So it's like when I as a customer buy an Insteon product, I don't know there's PubNub in there. But then using PubNub, Insteon's now able to collect data about my usage patterns or where I can be saving energy, et cetera so the- >> But then the alternative for them is to build a full-stack system, manage it, have system integrators, have operators-- >> I mean, that was exactly the case at Insteon. They had 23 on-call support agents all day, every day, trying to do exactly what PubNub did for them without that. >> John: Yeah, they save all that cost. It's kind of like why people use Amazon. >> Right, exactly. >> (laughs) I don't need a data center, I don't need staff. All right, what did you think about this event? Obviously, Cisco has been first in a lot of markets and succeeded in networking but didn't really knock it out of the park on smart home or-- >> Peter: Linksys. >> (laughs) And so on and so forth but now, with cloud-native, we're saying is that the opportunity for them? >> Bhavana: Yeah. >> What's your take on Cisco's moving up the stack? >> I mean, I think it's great. This is one of the first conferences that DevNet is hosting for developers, right? I just got here but we've had a booth here and people are saying really great things. And there's been a steady crowd. And apparently there have been great talks. So I'm actually very excited to give my talk and then go on. >> Peter: What time is your talk, today? >> Yeah, today at 5 p.m. and then I'm here tomorrow as well. So, excited to check out the whole experience. >> Great to have you on theCube and thanks for sharing PubNub and we look forward to getting more updates from you. And congratulations on your success. >> Bhavana: Thank you. >> And your customers, thanks for sharing. >> It was great to be here, thank you so much. >> John: Thanks so much. >> So you should stop by our booth when you- >> We'll stop by and check out PubNub, the real-time pub-sub service used by all cutting edge companies in the cloud-native. This is theCUBE, Cube Cloud. Check out our content at youtube.com/siliconangle. That's our Cube Cloud, all the content there for you. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Stay with us for more live, exclusive coverage from Cisco's inaugural event, DevNet Create, after this short break. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy and Planning.

(energetic music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's the CUBE, covering DevNetCreate 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in San Francisco for the inaugural event for Cisco's DevNetCreate, part of their DevNet classic developer community now extending out into the community of open source and cloud native and dev ops world, where applications and infrastructure coming together. It's the CUBE's exclusive two-days coverage. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Peter Burris, head of WikiBon.com research. Our next guess is Ben Brown, CEO of Botkit out of Austin. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you. >> So we were just chatting before we came on about how open source and how essentially using machines and humans workin' together, that there's a nice evolving machine learning marketplace for having new kinds of re-imagined recommendation engines. Chat bots that actually work. Integrations, again, back to software. >> Ben: Yeah. >> Tell us what you guys do, and how you guys relate to the cloud native, and what your role in open source is. >> Sure. So, it's real interesting, you know. Over the last couple of decades, an enormous amount of progress has been made on AI and machine learning, and NLP tools at these big companies like Google and Microsoft, and they are now giving that away, right? Like, it is free to use Facebook's top of the line machine learning algorithm. But, it's sort of a mystery and unfamiliar territory for developers coming from web or mobile. It's a black box that nobody's ever used before. So, what we do at Botkit is provide tools for developers, mostly developers who are coming from the web or coming from mobile development, and give them semantic, easy-to-use, and customized tools for building conversational user interfaces. And that can mean chat bots, that can mean voice skills for the Amazon Echo or Cortana or things like that, and give them these open source tools that allow them to take advantage of this exciting NLP and voice to text, and text to voice, and all that to build real software today. So what Botkit is is an open source library. It's free to use, it's MIT-licensed, so very liberally licensed, and it gives the developers tools like hearing and saying, right? So it's not about API calls and NLP classification and utterances and all that. It's about how does a robot think and act, and the metaphors around that. >> So I think of Botkit, I think of Webkit, these are languages of developers. So are you guys actually providing bot kits to create bots, or is it more of a platform? How do you guys describe what you do in open source, and how do you guys stay in business and keep the lights on? (laughter) >> Good question. Yeah, so we're a venture-backed startup. We have an open source toolkit and these kits, right? So if you want to build a Slack bot or a Facebook bot, we will give you 90% of the code that you need to bring that bot up and start talking. And that piece is all free. And we do that for Slack, for Facebook, for Twilio, for Cisco, for Alexa, and Microsoft, and a bunch of other platforms. And what we're really hoping is that we can instill in people, or sort of give to people a skill set that is akin to a web master, right? There's a bunch of skills that are interrelated that you need to actually bring this software to life. >> It saves time. It's tooling to save them time and to get acclimated and get working. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And then, on top of that, we have a set of power tools that sort of complete the process. Botkit, the open source piece is a software development library, but you also need deployment management and operational tools and content management and integrations and things like that. So that's where our business is. >> The class freemium model. The first hit's free, as they say. I'm sorry, that's a drug dealer model. (laughter) You get 'em in there but, as they scale, they're already successful, so it's not like you're gouging someone for not getting value out of it. >> Absolutely. I mean, we think about our business model in the same way a lot of other developer APIs do these days. >> Well, let's talk about some of those other developer APIs, because used to be that you used a language, then you would use a data management system, and then we start talking about web services, and that's all good. But where does this end up going, where you have a specialized toolkit for bots that you can add? You made up specialized toolkits for-- Amazon's talkin' about specialized toolkits for voice recognition that you can add. So is it just going to be in the interface? Are there going to be other classes of kits that developers are going to buy, and combine them together? Where do you see this going? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just like, you know, all software development that came before, right? Nobody built every line of code for their mobile app. Nobody had to define what a button was for iOS. That was done at a higher level. In the same way, people who are building these conversational apps, or composing their own code with third party services, with open source software and all that combine. So there's really interesting stuff going on. Like I said, there's NLP tools coming down from all of these big players, but also from small players. There are tools like human takeover, which is like a new thing that didn't exist before. You're talking to a bot, you're starting to get angry, IBM Watson can identify your sentiment and say, "Oh, this person is frustrated. Let's bring in "a real operator." So there's third-party services to actually manage that kind of thing. >> Male: I want that job, by the way. (laughter) >> Only angry customers. >> Parachute me in just for the angry customers, yeah. >> Does not sound like a great job, yeah. And then there are almost every kind of component that you might imagine existing in the web stack is being specialized, or the mobile stack, is being specialized for conversational stuff, 'cause it's just different enough, right? So analytics and CRM and push notifications. >> I mean, you don't got to be a rocket scientist to figure out that voice is the hottest app in the market. I mean, you got Alexa, you got Siri, Google. I mean, voice interface is here. That's conversational, to your point. >> Ben: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> So now software will evolve. So that's kind of where you guys are betting, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean-- >> John: Not just voice, but conversational software. >> Right. I mean, as I was just saying in my session here, I don't think anybody really wanted to sit down at a typewriter attached to a television. That was just a technology that we had at the time. Charles Babbage or whatever was dreaming about the thinking machine. So we're just much, much closer to that now, and we think that, over the next five or ten years, almost all software will have some sort of conversational element, whether that's in the app, does it mean you're on an Alexa skill that's embedded in the car, who knows? >> It's just never fight fashion, but this is a relevant fashion piece, where we see machine learning get rendered in AI and some of the cool applications like cars and voice and AI. So I got to ask you. You mention that all this free stuff's comin' out. It's like Christmas, it's like a kid in the candy store if you're a developer. How, in your opinion, has that shaped the developer ecosystems because, outside of the young kids who are just green and have no idea that it wasn't like this before. Back in the old days we used to actually program everything. Lot of cool stuff coming in for free from Google, from Facebook, in some cases Amazon. But I mean, what's the impact? >> I mean, people are able to take advantage of much more sophisticated technology much earlier on in the process, right? For the last 10 years, we've been talking about "Ah, machine learning, isn't it great if you're Google, "and you have ten trillion data points?" But nobody else has it, so it's not even worth talking about. But now, it's possible. You can start on day one, and start training your machine learning and models and things like that. And you don't have to actually invest in that technology. And voice to text, things like-- >> It's given them more speed to get to newer high, the higher functioning stuff. >> Yeah, absolutely. And it's bringing that kind of technology that was-- Most of AI has been in academia, right, and in research. And now, all of a sudden, it's on my kitchen counter. My kid now uses NLP technology every day, and that is a big-- Without the independent developers and smaller apps-- >> Well, the IoT's going to be in your wheelhouse, too. As more things get connected, the interfaces will be more human. >> Well, I was going to ask a question about that. Does this technology-- Today, the technology's mainly thought of part of the interface between the machine and the human being. Does this technology end up in between machines? >> Yeah, absolutely, sort of between bot. Inter-bot communication is very, very interesting. And then also-- So yes, absolutely. But also, like being on the other side of the human, or like between people, right? So customer service representatives using AI to have solutions suggested to them that they can pick from and things like that, like translating systems that suggest the response, so that you can use it if you so desire. And it makes your job easier, but it's not actually doing the transaction for you. It's really, really interesting, and that's nothing that the end user would actually experience themselves. >> Final question for you. Cisco has always been the king of networks. I mean, the internet was their wave, they rode that hard. We all know what they've done. Amazing, connecting routes together, routers, MLPS routers, PLSM routers, paths. I mean, they own that. Now they're moving up the stack, so now you're seeing this a gesture of going into the community, bringing apps and infrastructure together, to bring true dev ops. Kind of like what you're doing with your interfaces to software. What's your thoughts on this strategy. So, what's your take and reaction to what Cisco's doing? >> Clearly, the software layer is becoming more and more powerful and prevalent for people, and a bigger part of people's lives. So I think it makes tons of sense. And what Cisco's going to gain by opening these things up is the innovation of the community, like they were never going to be able to do the things that people are going to do with Spark APIs. And the way that things are connected and interwoven to each other, because I have a smart home, I have all these IoT devices. They don't talk to one another. I am left to weave them together. >> Peter: You mediate. >> I mediate, right. And I'm sophisticated enough to be able to do that. But if they're going to make it as easy as plug and play, and drag and drop, it's going to open up all sorts of exciting capabilities. >> It's the quote as saying waterfall versus agile, which one's faster? Agile. >> Well, but that's exactly why I asked the question about bots reconciling, or bots you having mediating between different devices or different machines, is that it could be a way that a human being can understand a set of instructions for how these things engage other stuff, so that it still looks like it's a set of human interfaces while, at the same time, it's operating at machine speed with machine efficiency. >> This is one of the most interesting things, particularly in the IoT space, that I've seen. There's an app called Thing-tin that is like a chat room for devices, and the way it works is like those devices emit machine messages and human readable messages, but they can talk to each other in machine language, but you can read it as a dialogue. >> That's SkyNet. That's SkyNet. I'm tellin' you, it's coming. >> Yeah, if SkyNet only turns your lights on and off. >> Machines talking to each other. "Hey, go kill that human over there." (laughter) >> Somebody's going to have to program it to kill first. >> We need algorithms to watch the algorithms. Great stuff. I think Cisco clearly, this is a move that they have to make. I've been following Cisco for many generations. Past 10 years, they were one of the first in smart homes, one of the first in smart cities, first with IoT, they called it Internet of Everything, the human network, social network. They had the pulse on all the right trends, but could not execute it, Peter. And, to your point, they'll never get there without open source, in my opinion. I think this is a signal that Cisco can do that. Now here's the key: They have the keys to the kingdom. It's called the network, and I think that making that programmable and extensible is a great strategy. >> Well, that's what they have to be able to do. They have to be able to make it, they have to make it obviously available to developers so they can create value on it. And that's something that they're still struggling to do. >> Yeah, so when he does the Botkit and does all this new creative activity going on, the network has to be adaptive and not get in the way, and not for the creativity of the developer, 'cause networking is hard. >> And that's a great point. And so much of what we do at Botkit is try to drain the complexity out of this complex stuff and make it available so that this enormous amount of power is available to the developer of today. >> Power to the developer, developers are in charge, developers are driving the network policy in a dynamic way. Congratulations on your success, great to chat with you. I'm going to check out Botkit. I already have some ways, Peter and I are already lookin' at it for the clips, and then the crowd chat virtually, great stuff, congratulations. Ben Brown, CEO of Botkit. Check it out, Botkit-dot-AI. We are soon to be replaced by bots here in the CUBE (laughter) with talking machines, but that's down the way, when SkyNet takes over. This is the CUBE here at the inaugural event for Cisco DevNetCreate. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. We'll be back after this short break. (electronic music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior--

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're live in San Francisco for CUBE's special coverage, exclusive coverage, of Cisco Systems DevNet Create. It's an inaugural event for DevNet, a new extension to their developer program. DevNet, which is their classic developer program for the Cisco ecosystem, network guys, so on and so forth, moving packets around, hardware guys. DevNet Create is about developers and dev ops and cloud-native, all the goodness of application developers. Where apps meets infrastructure, certainly with the Cisco acquisition of AppDynamics, a new world order is coming down the pipe. Cisco's moving up the stack. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris is my co-host, our next guest is Val Bercovici, CUBE alumni and also guest analyst in our studio in Palo Alto, also the cofounder of Peritus.ai, and now you can talk about it. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, John. We get to talk about it, finally. >> So before we get into your company, and I want to drill into it because the first public CUBE interview, drilling down on what you're working on. What's your take on Cisco's event here, because, I've known Cisco since I moved to Silicon Valley, 18 years, and even before then, and they scaled all the internet connecting networks. There's always been a discussion internally inside Cisco about moving up the stack. And it's always been kind of like a Civil War. Half the company wants to move up the stack, half doesn't, and now, you've been in NetApp, you know this world and its infrastructure, its hardware, its gear, its boxes, network packets. This is a seminal moment for Cisco. They've tried some open source before, but this seems like an all-in bet. Your thoughts? >> It is, and I was just telling Yodi Rahm, before we went live on stage that I think this is like Goldilocks event, right? It's my first. Apparently, it's the first one of its kind here at Cisco, and for me it's not too big. It's not too small. I find it really just the right size, and I find it very well-targeted, in terms of the fellow speakers, panelists that I was on with today in terms of, I see the right amount of laptops, the right amount of code, basically, amongst the attendees on the floor here. So my first impression, 'cause that's all I have so far, is it's a very well-targeted show, and it's not unique anymore. You'll notice Intel kind of pulled back from having one large event, one large annual event, and smaller more targeted events for developers, for operators, for other ISVs, and so forth. >> You're talking about the IDF Intel Developer Forum. >> The IDF, yeah, it's no longer a big, monolithic event. They split it up into more- >> And IBM has also collapsed their shows into one monster show. So little micro-events seem to be the norm. >> Yeah, I wouldn't even call it quite even a micro-event. It's a bit bigger than that, but it's not a VMworld . >> It's not a Dreamforce. >> It's not a COMDEX to VR sales. >> Interesting, I like they did their homework on the panels. So in terms of subject matter, the agenda looks great, but I do agree with you. I like how principals are here. It's not just staff here. It's both people in the trenches at Cisco, and the execs are here. Susie Wee and some other folks, they run Cisco a lot. They're all here. >> And their CTO, this morning, I caught the opening keynote livestream on the way over here. She did a fantastic job describing the role of the infrastructure developer, which is something that is a bit nebulous to nail down, at least it has been in the past, and I'm really glad that Cisco is echoing that, because I think it helps their entire ecosystem, their partner ecosystem, particularly former employers like NetApp of mine. >> I'm usually critical of big companies trying to put their toe in the water with some event that looks like a little cloud washing or you know, here or there, but I think Cisco's got a legit opportunity with programmable infrastructure. And I think, just in general, straight up, they do, because their infrastructure, and Peter and I talked about that. But I think IoT is really the big driver. They could really, that's a network connection. It's at the edge. It requires intelligence. That's a good angle for them. >> It's a great angle. The only beef I have, the gripe I have, is they still call it IoE, I think. If it's going to be Internet of Everything, and it's Internet of nothing, right? I really wish they'd kind of stick to the agreed term, and what they are doing of course is giving- >> But they were first with IoE. They were, you got to give Cisco, when they ran those commercials, what 10 years ago? >> Yeah. >> You know. >> It's a personal in for me. The commercials are fantastic. It's just the term bothers me. >> They got dogma with IoE, come on, get rid of it. Okay, tell me about your company? >> So Peritus.ai, we've realized now there's a chance to go beyond traditional digital disruption of existing industries to cognitive disruption. Let me explain what I mean by that. We're seeing a lot of increasing pace of change in data centers. The conference here, and all the technologies spoken about here, are very foreign to more traditional data center operators, and so the new environments, microservice architectures, or cloud-native apps or so forth. It's a pace of change that we haven't seen before. Agile business and agile software developer models can push code out realistically on a daily basis, whereas the waterfall model and the iCode models in most IT service practitioners practice, that's a manual or quarterly update cycle, with formal change managed practices. >> John: A more settled, structured. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Slow. >> Familiar. >> John: Reliable. >> You know, but it's the past, and the pace of change now is creating stress within IT organizations and stress within the product support organizations of the vendors that they choose to deploy. You couple that with increasing complexity of the environments we have here. We have a lot going on, the ethos of CNCF, which is container packaged, dynamically orchestrated, and micro services architected apps, cloud-native apps. The abstraction layers are masking a lot of complexity there, but the complexity is still there. And you have very good availability if you're able to write to cloud-native principles as a developer, but nevertheless, you still got that .001% of your outages so forth. And the last line of defense towards business continuity is still a human. You still got escalation engineers and support organizations that go through pretty contrived and complicated workflows to triage and diagnose problems, perhaps a case manager to assign a case or subject manager expert, get that back and forth information with the customer and finally resolve the case, and this is what we term cognitive disruption. The maturity of the AI platforms now have reached a point where you can take these complicated workflows that require nuance and inference, and actually apply true machine learning and deep learning to them. And if not entirely automate the resolution of these complex cases, better prepare a scarce resource, an escalation engineer with lots of experience, with more context up front when they encounter the case, so they can close it more quickly, and this has- >> So you're targeting, so if I understand this correctly, you're targeting the personnel in the data center. >> Val: The supportability space. >> Escalation engineers, the human labor, the last mile, if you will, or whatever, first mile, how you look at it. >> Correct. We see APM vendors in this space, we see ITSM vendors in the space. They're partners and even platforms for us. No one really is focused on supportability and automating those workflows using cognitive techniques. >> John: Give an example, give an example. >> The best example I can give actually is firsthand. I'll try and be as generic as I can to protect the innocent, but if you take a look- >> John: NetApp. >> (laughs) It's not even specifically a NetApp case. >> John: Okay, all right. >> If you look at the supply chain upstream, let's talk about electronic supply chain. If a particular manufacturer defect occurs upstream, that defect gets shipped in bundles, purchased by an equipment supplier vendor in bundles, and deployed by customers in bundles. So it's not like one of these one node outage situations is the best case scenario, traditional triple replication, you know. >> John: It's a bad batch basically. >> A bad batch. >> A lot of bad product. >> That can take out not just a node, it can take out a rack. It can take out multiple racks of storage gear, switching gear, server hosts, and so forth. In that case, again, your last line of defense is a human. You basically got to triage and diagnose the problem, could be hardware problem, could be a driver-software problem, could be an upstream OS or database problem. And it's a very stressful environment, a very stressful situation. You can take a look at prior case notes. You can take a look at machine logs and data. You can take a look at product documentation and bill of materials from suppliers, and you can pre-analyze a lot of that, and factor that into your diagnosis, effectively having it almost ready before the case is even opened, so that when the escalation engineer is assigned the case, they don't start from ground zero. They start from third base and almost they're rounding their way to home, and they're able to apply all the prior knowledge, algorithms never sleep. All the prior knowledge in terms of all the cases that have actually been dealt with that match that to a degree. They're never perfect matches, because that's just business process automation. There's a degree of inference required, and using AI techniques, we're able to guess that you know what? I've seen this before. It's very obscure, but it's actually going to be this resolution. >> So AI's technology that you're using in machine learning and data, what problem are you solving specifically? Saving them time, getting them faster resolutions? >> So we're improving the efficiency of support operations. There's always margin pressures within customer support operations. We're fundamentally solving complex system problems. We've reached a point now where business process automation can solve trivial support cases. >> John: Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on. Expert system's supposed to do this. >> And they did in the past, and now we're evolving beyond the expert. >> Not really. Remember those expert system stays? >> Yeah, I remember LISP and all those early days, so yeah. >> So this kind of sounds like a modern version of an expert system to aid the support engineers to either have a predetermined understanding of options and time to solution. >> So we're able to do so much more than that, right? We're able to create what we call otologies. We're able to categorize all the cases that you've seen in the past, find out whether this new one fits an existing category, if so, if it matches other criteria, if not, defining a category. We're able to orchestrate. Resolution is not just a one-shot deal. Resolution is diagnose the problem, find out if you have some subject matter experts available to resolve the issue, assign it to them, track their progress, close the case, follow up on customer satisfaction. All those things are pretty elaborate workflows that can be highly automated today with cognitive approach-- >> Congratulations on launching. Thanks for spending the time to lay that out. What's next? You've got some seed funding? >> Val: We've got some seed funding. >> You got some in an incubator at the Hive in Palo Alto, which we know quite well. Rob is great, Rob is a great friend. He's done great, he's done great. How many people do have, what are you guys looking to do? What are some of the priorities? >> We are hiring. We're definitely looking to get more data scientists on staff, more full-stack engineers particularly with log experience. We're still looking for a CTO and leadership team. So there's a lot of hiring coming in place. >> John: How many in there now? >> We have about, less than 10 people working right now. >> It's a great opportunity for a classic early-stage opportunity. >> Yeah, early stage opportunity. We're addressing a hot space, and what I love is I personally shifted from being a provider of cloud-native solutions in this market to being a consumer. So I'm seeing exactly how a perfect storm is coming together of machine and deep learning algorithms, running on, orchestrated-- >> John: Both sides of the table. You should talk to Mark Sister. >> Yeah. He's been on both sides. What's it like to be on the other side now? >> It's everything I actually thought it would be, because at the end of the day, I always say, developers are the ultimate pragmatists. So it's not so much about brand loyalty at any particular vendors. What solution, whether it's an open source library, whether it's a commercial library, whether it's a propietary cloud service or something in between. What solution can solve my task, this next task? And composite applications are a very real thing right now. >> So we had a question I posted into the crowd chat, from this social net. I'm going to ask you the same questions. So Burt's watching and maybe you'll find that thread, and I'll add to it later. Here's the question. What challenges still remain as part of implementing DevOps, in your opinion? How did you see the landscape, and how are people addressing them? In your expert opinion, what's the answer to that question? What's your opinion? >> It's a two-faceted answer, at least. The first one, it's not a cliche. It's still a cultural challenge. If you want to actually want to map, it's not even a cultural challenge specifically, it's Conway's Law. Any product output, software output, is a function of your organizational structure that created it. So I find that whether you want to call it culture, whether you want to call it org structure, the org structure's rarely in place to incentivize entire teams to collaborate together throughout a full CICD pipeline process. You've still got incentive structures and org structures in place for people to develop code, unit test it, perhaps even integration test it, but I see more often than I'd like to, isolated or fenced off operations teams that take that and try to make it something real. They might call themselves SREs, and outside recovery engineers, but they're not integrated enough into the development process, in my mind. >> So you're saying the organization structures are also foreclosing their ability be agile, even though they're trying hard, that the incentives are too grounded in there. >> So I still see a lot of skunkworks projects as DevOps projects, and it shouldn't be that way anymore, right? There should be, where there's a legitimate business reason for more agile businesses, there should be a much more formal DevOps structure, as opposed to skunkworks DevOps structure. So that's one challenge, and it's not new, but it's also not resolved. And the other one really is this blind spot for the autonomous data center vision, this blind spot for operations being 100% automated and really just never having to deal with the problem. The blind spot is everything breaks. New technology just happens to break in new ways, but it does fundamentally break, and if your last line of defense is a human or a group of humans, you can expect a very, very different sort of responsiveness and agility as opposed to having something automated. >> Peter and I have been talking all morning the Ford firing of Mark Fields, which was announced yesterday. He quote retired by the Twitter handle of Ford, which is just code words for he got pushed aside. One, we're big fans of Mark Fields, before we covered Ford there in Palo Alto, doing some innovative centers over there, and also a Cloud Foundry customer. So I was actually, took notice of that. We were commenting on not so much the tech, but the guy got fired in less than three years into his journey as chief executive. >> Val: Yeah. >> Now the stock's down 39% so the hammer's coming down from either the family, Ford family, or Wall Street, Peter thinks Wall Street. But this brings up the question, how are you going to be a transformational leader, if you don't have the runway? Back to your org structure. This is, this is-- >> I'm like a broken record. I was thinking that yesterday as I was watching CNBC, and just thinking in my mind, processing what they were announcing. I'm realizing in my head, I bet why, because I don't know, but I bet why, I speculate why he got fired, because he wasn't able to put the org structure and incentives in place to run faster, and that's what the board asked his successor is run faster, and if his successor doesn't put the org structure and the incentives in place to be an agile business. That's the definition of insanity. It's banging your head against the wall. >> If I had to add one more thing to that comment, which by the way I agree with you. If you could configure an asset in a company besides the organizational structure, so you did that, what would your next asset be? More cloud, more data-centric, what would be? >> It might be cliche, but it's totally true, I would have a cloud-first approach to everything. So we don't remember this guy called Obama anymore, but really he did a pretty revolutionary thing, when he brought in a CIO eight, nine years ago, and he made every federal government department defend a capital purchase. And they basically have to go through a multi-hundred page document to defend a capital IT acquisition, but to actually go cloud first or cloud native, didn't require almost any pre-approval at all to get funding. >> So we made it easier incentives to go cloud. >> Created incentives, and I'm a big believer that cloud is not a panacea. >> That helped Amazon, not IBM, as the CIA case now. >> I'm a big believer in life cycles, so it's not like cloud is the rubber stamp solution for every problem, but the beginning innovation phase of every new product line or revenue stream really should be in the cloud right now. The amazing services, forget about IS and all that. Look at the machine language and APIs, IoT APIs, the entire CICD pipelines that are automated and simplistic, the innovation phase for everyone should be in the crowd. Then you got to take a step back, look at that bill, get over your sticker shock, and figure out whether you can afford to stay in a cloud using maybe some of those higher-level proprietary high-margin services and whether you want to re-factor. And that's where professional services kick in, and I think that might be the next great disruption for AI, is re-factoring apps. >> I think one of the things, final question I want to get your thoughts on. Pretend that we're at Cisco and we go back to the ranch, and someone says, "Hey, what's that DevNet Create?" What's our advice to our peers, if we had an opinion that people valued inside Cisco, doubled down on DevNet Create, continue, merge it DevNet? What would your advice be? >> I'm a long time James Governor fan. Developers are the new kingmakers. Actually I think we're in this situation that's not very well understood by business leaders right now, where developers are influencing all the technology infrastructure decisions we're making, but they don't necessarily write the checks. But if you want to run an agile business, a digital business today, you can't do it without happy developers and a good developer experience, so you have to cater to their needs and their biases and so forth, and at shows like this I think, bring Cisco's large ecosystem to bear, where we can figure out how Cisco can maximize the developer experience, how partners, and I'm soon to be a Cisco partner myself at Peritus.ai can maximize their developer experience and just drive more modern business. >> Bring the developer community in with the networking, get those margins connected. Val Bercovici, cofounder of Peritus.ai, this is theCUBE with exclusive coverage of the inaugural event of Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, returning after this short break. (electric music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director.