(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Chicago, guys and gals. Lisa Martin here in Chicago with Ansible Fest 2022 with John Furrier. John, we've had great conversations. This is day two of our coverage. We were here yesterday. >> Yeah. >> We're here today. We've gotten to talk with great folks in the Ansible community, the partner ecosystem customers. We've broken some news that they've talked about. Now we're going to talk about industrial automation, IT/OT convergence. What excites you about this conversation? >> Yeah, this is going to be a great segment. This is one of the feature keynote presenters, customer Rockwell. Huge in OT, IT, edge, robotics, plants, equipment. Everything that we probably have, they do. This guest has really great story about what's cutting edge and what's relevant in the edge and IT slash automation area. Super relevant. Looking forward to the segment. >> Yes, please welcome David Rapini, the Global PlantPAx business manager at Rockwell Automation. David, great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Nice to be here. >> Give the audience a bit of an overview of Rockwell Automation and then let's dig into what you guys are doing there. >> Sure. Rockwell Automation probably is the largest global automation provider of equipment focused exclusively on automation. About 22,000 employees. About 7 billion kind of revenue numbers. We make, basically, controllers for the automation industry, industrialized software, power drives, you know, of the robotics content, smart cart kind of applications. >> Lisa: And what are your key industries that you're covering? >> Wow, so that's a broad market. So we do a lot of different industries. So we cover, obviously, oil and gas, life science, water, wastewater. We do automotive. So just about any industry, actually. Any place that needs industrial automation covering any type of manufacturing process or any type of process application. We're pretty much there. >> John: You know, it's interesting, IOT has been a word, in and of things, light bulb, wearables, industrial IOT where you're in is a really key space. It's physical plants. Sometimes it's sensitive critical infrastructure for governments, businesses. >> David: Exactly. >> I mean there's running stuff. >> David: Definitely. >> This is huge. >> Yeah, and it's a big area for us, like getting that data, you know, everybody talks about analytics and what the world's going to be happening to in that IT, OT space. And Rockwell's really well positioned at that lower level where we actually own the data, create the data for all that analytics that you're talking about. >> What was your main message today on stage? I want to replay that here and then get into it because I think this is really, we're starting to see, real traction in adoption, in automation, cloud scale, edges happening, exploding. What was your key message on stage today? >> Yeah, I think it's that the world's really changing in that space. You know, five years ago you would have had a completely different message around, you know that connectivity and having that content actually delivered to that space and having, like even the connectivity to that OT space makes people uncomfortable in that world because there's obviously moving pieces, you know, damage to equipment, you know God forbid any types of explosions or things like that on bad environmental type conditions. So we're working in that space to really make those connections much more open and now that those connections are starting to happen and we're getting more and more comfort with that, in that layer, there's a lot more we can do in that space which is kind of why we're here. >> And talk about why Ansible and what it's going to be able to unlock for Rockwell to be able to achieve. >> Sure. There's a lot of areas that we want to play with, but our, in Ansible but our first targets are really our, primarily our servers. So there's a lot of edge based servers out there, you know, we call them a pass server, which is a process automation system server. And there's an engineering workstation operator, which are those main core servers. Some of them are redundant, you know, the OT guys to them it's a burden to manage that content. They're good at making, you know, oil and gas they know how to do water wastewater. They know how to build cars. But managing servers, you know, not in their wheelhouse. >> John: Not in their wheelhouse.(laughs) >> Exactly. Right. So having that capability and that connection to get down there gives us some power with Ansible to go ahead and start building them initially. So making that initial builds out of the gate. That makes them really consistent and built together, so every application looks and feels the same and they know what they're going to get when their servers power up. So that's a big one. But, but just maintain them, keeping them patched, you know keeping security vulnerabilities down. You know, I was in a facility not long ago that was still running Windows 2000. Right. So, you know, they have an application there that's just working. It works. They don't want to touch it and it's been running for 20 years, so why touch it? Right. So this was going to kind of hopefully break that challenge. >> Make sure that you keep that password handy. (laughs) >> David: Yeah, exactly right. (laughs) >> We've had (indistinct) people leave. What about the security aspect is OT has been locked down, mindset, hardened, end to end, supply chains, vetted. Everything's kind of tight on the old OT model. Relatively secure when you get to IT, you mentioned vulnerabilities but the innovation's there too. So how does that reconcile for you? What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, we see a big move there, right? So it used to be they were always head head to head butting heads IT, OT, you know it focuses on, you know, keeping the system secure keeping the data down, locked down, and reliable. OT focuses more on production, right? Making sure they hit their numbers in the production. So oftentimes, you know, having it push out a patch in the middle of production line in the middle of a day and rebooting a server shuts down production and you know, that those kind of conflicts. Yeah, exactly. So those conflicts were, were pretty common. There's still a lot of that there, but it's getting better. Yeah, right. And I see more and more of that working together as a team to, to solve a lot of those challenges. And honestly, I keep going back to the analytics angle and the diagnostics and that world of deep data, you know, big data kind of mining, you know, without the IT space to cover that the cloud data storage, the horsepower. >> If you had to kind of like rank the complexity 'cause we were just talking before you came on about things got to get complex before they can get simpler 'cause the inflection points bring that new capability. What's some of the complexities that you're seeing that are going to be either abstracted away or solved with some of these new technologies like Ansible and others that are coming fast? Cause at the end of the day it's got to still be easier. It's not going to be hard. That can't be harder. >> Yeah. So I'll give you a real world example that's a little embarrassing. So today we deliver our past servers as a solution and we we provide that as a VM image that people start with as the first building block. But once you start to deploy that and actually connect it with the rest of the infrastructure, hook it up to our factory talk directory, hook it up to the DNS service, once you start doing all that work it's about 700 mouse clicks that somebody has to know what they're doing to actually spin it up the rest of the way and get it connected with Ansible. We're cutting that number like in half is the hope. So, and, and we're going to continue to expand that and make it even less work for the users to >> Talk about skill gap issue. The training alone on that is to have the right people. >> That's the second big piece, right? So, so those OT people typically don't have that skill set. So you have to have a fairly high skilled level person to do that work. We're hoping to take that, that work off of them and put that on on answer. >> Yeah, that sounds pretty consistent. Do you think, is that the, kind of the consistency of the problem space is that the OT just has a different goal and they just need something to be invisible and easy, like electricity? >> Yeah, I think so. Especially in this world, right? In that OT space, right in in that IT space. Sorry. Yeah, so, so managing servers and things like that it's just is not what they want to want to deal with and it's not what they went to school for and it's not what they're doing when their job when they get hired. Right. Yeah. >> It sounds to me like Rockwell Automation is a facilitator of the IT and OT folks coming together and actually working better together, maybe understanding each other's requirements, goals, objectives. >> Most definitely. So we have, you know we are offering a lot of cloud content now. We're continuing to expand that content. We're working with a lot of different IT departments and OT departments to try to marriage those two groups together to try to bring that stuff together. We have a partnership with Cisco where we actually, you know, industrialize you know, some of their switch components and sell that as as part of our content and that relationship gives us a big inroad with a lot of the IT departments. >> That's important to have that be able to speak the language of both sides. >> Yeah, definitely. Right. Knowing and understanding the terminology and just being able to know the challenges that IT guys face as well as the OTs is really a big component of what we do. >> You know, one of the questions I wanted to ask and 'cause the keynote was very cool, but you made a comment that your claim to fame was that you wrote the code for the Spider-Man ride at Universal. Tell a story. How does that work? I'm just, I've rode them many times. So take us through that little journey. >> Yeah, so I, every time people ask me what we do for a living and automation, you know, I can talk about, you know, making cars and things like that, but it doesn't ring troops. So I did do a lot of work on Spider-Man Ride which is at Universal Studios, you know it was a real challenge, making sure you know how that connections actually work and make, I did most of the motion control content for that to make the movements of the cars, you know, seamless with the backgrounds. Definitely a lot of fun. So those kind of projects are rare but they're really fun when you get those. >> I hope you have a free pass for any time you want to go on it. >> I don't, unfortunately. >> Oh, you should. >> I try to get in the backrooms all the time at that facility but it's rare to hear. >> I mean it's like, it's a high end rollercoaster machine. It's like, I mean that is this robotics, industrial cause, this, I mean it's an intense ride. >> It is, and you know, you never move more than like eight feet on that whole ride and it feels like you've dropped, you know 2000 feet out of the sky on some of that content. So it's really amazing. I will say it's a little dated. I've been writing on the part of my team worked on the the Harry Potter rides, which are much next generation. >> I couldn't get on that one, line was too long. >> It's a long way, but it's worth it. >> Dave I asked you a question on the future for people watching who are new observing industrial IOT. What's the most important story going on in your world today? Is it the transformation? Is it the standards? Is it the security? What's, what are the top two or three things that are going on that are really transformative right now in automating at the edge? >> I really want to say that it's standardization. It's about using open standards and standard protocols to deliver content in a reusable fashion. So, you know, having custom proprietary content like a lot of automation suppliers or even like a lot of other industries, it's hard to maintain. It doesn't work well with other products. It's great 'cause you can do a lot of flexibility what you want to do, but at the end of the day it's about keeping the thing running and hooking it up to other components so that open standards based solution you'll see us spending more energy on you know, part of the Ansible open community thing is nice in that space as well. And you'll see us doing more stuff in that place that, that play. >> Talk about your influence there in the community. You know, we, we've been talking the last couple of days about Ansible is nothing if not the power of the community, the collaboration within. Talk about being able to influence that and what that means to you personally as well as to Rockwell. >> Yeah, so open communities are big for us. We have, you know, obviously a customer advisory boards and things like that that we deal with but we also have an open community forum where people can share dialogues and share ideas. We have large events, we have a process solution users group events where we bring in, you know hundreds not thousands of engineering people to to talk to all of these problems that they're facing. And it's not a Rockwell event it's a, you know, community event, right. Where we actually are talking about, you know what industry problem people are seeing. And a lot of the IT OT convergence thing is really top of mind. A lot of people say no minds especially the cybersecurity content. >> What are some of the things that you heard the last couple of days, announcement wise? Obviously big news coming out today that excites you about the direction that Ansible's going and how it's responding to the community. >> Yeah, I think a lot of their feedback that they get and sitting a lot of these sessions, they get a lot of interesting feedback from their customer base. And reacting to that I think is very high on their priority list. And what I've been seeing here, you know, some of the AI stuff that they were showing on automatically, like defining some of the scripts for their code that intelligence behind a lot of that content was amazing. I see a lot of that moving forward. And we're heading the same direction at Rockwell as well with more AI in our company. >> The data's a big story too coming out of all the devices, analytics, great stuff. >> Yeah, I'm pulling that data up into the cloud space and trying to do something valuable with all that data. It's, you know, we've had big data for a long time. It's just figuring out analytics and how to actually act on that data and get it back into the control to do something with. >> It's all getting aside. My serious question on this is that, you know is it the year finally OT and IT converge? Seems like it's been trying for about a decade. >> Yeah, that's a tough one to answer. So I would say it's not there yet. I think there's still a lot of conflict in that space. You know, the OT guys still have a long history of that space, but as you see more retirement and more people phasing out of that and younger crowds coming in, you know the automation space is ripe for that kind of transition because coming out of college, you know jumping into automation isn't always the top of the notch. A lot of people want to go work at the big Amazons or wherever. >> A lot, a lot of stuff going on in space. It's pretty cool. A lot of physical, I've seen a lot more machine learning and physical devices in the industry we've been reporting on. It's interesting. I think it's close to a tipping point because we saw machine learning and the trivial apps like chat bots never really took off, yep. Just expert systems basically, but they're not really going the next level. So now they are, you're starting to see more, you know of wisdom projects, you know, different models being adopted. So I see AI now kind of kicking up similar to OT IT. >> Yeah, most definitely. You know, we have a lot of projects in that space like doing predictive analysis on, let's just say something simple like a pump, right? If you have pumps out there that are running for years and years, but you notice that there's a trend that on day 305 or whatever you know, a bearing starts to fail all the time. You know, that kind of analytics can start doing predictive maintenance content and start pushing out work orders in advance before the things fail because downtime costs millions of dollars for these maintenance. >> Downtime also incidents, right? So you never know, right? >> Exactly. Right, right. So it's good to have that safety net at least from a manufacturing perspective. >> Final question for me. What's the most exciting thing going on in your world right now if you had to kind of pick one thing that you're most jazzed up about? >> I have to say, you know, Rockwell's doing a big shift to cloud-based content and more big data numbers like we were just talking about for that AI. That complexity of what you can do with AI and the value that you can do to like just, you know if I can make quality of a product a half a percent better that's millions of dollars for my customer and I see us doing a lot of work in that space and moving that forward. That's big for me, I think. >> And what are some of that, my last question is what are some of the impacts that customers can expect from that? >> Yeah, so everything from downtime to product quality to increasing production rates and volumes of data that come out. You know, we do something called model predictive control that does, you know, very tight control on control loops to improve like just the general product quality with a lot of the big data numbers that are coming in on that. So you'll see us moving more in that space too to improve you know, product quality and then downtime. >> And really driving outcomes, business outcomes for your customers. David, thank you so much for joining us on the program, sharing what Rockwell Automation is doing. We appreciate your insights, your time and we want to keep watching to see what comes next. >> Sure. Glad to be here. It's great. Thank you very much. >> Our pleasure. For our guest, our John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You've watched theCUBE Live in Chicago, Ansible Fest 2022. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Chicago. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We're live with the Cube at Ansible Fest 2022. This is not only Ansible's 10th anniversary, John Wood. It's the first in-person event in three years. About 14 to 1500 people here talking about the evolution of automation, really the democratization opportunities. Ansible >>Is money, and this segment's gonna be great. Cub alumni are back, and we're gonna get an industry perspective on the automation journey. So it should be great. >>It will be great. We've got two alumni back for the price of wine. Scott Canine joins us, Director of Worldwide Automation at Kendra. A Nelson Shoe is back as well. Product marketing director at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you back on the, on the live cube. >>Oh, thank you for having us. And, and you know, it's really great to be back here live and in person and, and, you know, get a chance to see you guys again. >>Well, and also you get, you get such a sense of the actual Ansible community here. Yeah. And, and only a fraction of them that are here, but people are ready to be back. They're ready to collaborate in person. And I always can imagine the amount of innovation that happens at these events, just like off the show floor, people bumping into each other and go, Hey, I had this idea. What do you think, Scott? It's been just about a, a year since Kenel was formed. Talk to us about the last close to a year and what that's been like. Especially as the world has been so, chops >>The world been Yeah, exactly. Topsy turvy. People getting back to working in person and, and everything else. But, you know, you know, throw on that what we've done in the last year, taking Kendra, you know, outside of being a part of ibm Right. In our own company at this point, you know, and you know, you hear a lot of our executives and a lot of our people when we talk about it, like, Oh yeah, it's, you know, it's a $19 billion startup. We got freedom of action. We can do all these different things. But, you know, one of the ways I look at it is we are a $19 billion startup, which means we've got a lot of companies out there that are trusting us to, no matter what change we're doing, continue to deliver their operations, do it flawlessly, do it in a way so they can continue to, to service their clients effectively and, and don't break 'em. And, and so that to me, you know, the way we do that and the way I focusing on that is automation Ansible, obviously corridor strategy, getting there. >>Yeah. And I'd like to get your thoughts too, because we seeing a trend, we've been reporting on this with the cloud growth and the scale of cloud and distributed computing going cloud native, the automation is the front and piece center of all conversations. Automate this, make developers go faster. And with the pandemic, we're coming out of that pandemic. You post pandemic with large scale automation, system architecture, a lot more like architectural conversations and customers leaning on new things. Yeah. What are you seeing in this automation framework that you guys are talking about? What's been the hot playbook or recipe or, or architecture to, you know, play on words there, but I mean, this is kind of the, the key focus. >>Yeah. I mean, if you, one of the things that I com customer comp talks, I've been pulled into a lot recently, have all been around thinking about security, right? A lot in terms of security and compli, I think, I mean, think about the world environment as a whole, right here, everything that's been going on. So, so people are, are conscious of how much energy that's being used in their data centers, right? And people are conscious of how secure they are, right? Are they, you know, the, their end customers are trusting them with data information about them, right? And, and they're trusting us to make sure that those systems are secure to make sure that, you know, all that is taken care of in the right way. And so, you know that what's hot security and compliance, right? What can we do in the energy space, right? Can we do things to, to help clients understand better their energy consumption as, as, you know, especially as we get now in Europe to the winter months, can we do things there that'll help them also be better in that space, Right? Reduce their >>Costs and a lot more cloud rails obviously right there. You got closer and you got now Ansible, they're kind of there to help the customers put it together at scale. This has been the big conversation last year, remember was automate, automate, automate, right? This year it's automation everywhere, in every piece of the, the landscape edge. It's been big discussion tomorrow here about event driven stuff. This is kind of a change of focus and scope. Can you like, share your thoughts on how you see how big this is in terms of the, the, the customer journey >>In terms, I'm sorry, in terms of, >>In terms of their architecture, how they're rolling out automation, >>What's their Yeah, yeah. So, so in terms of their rolling out arch, arch in terms of them consuming architecture, right? And the architecture or consuming automation. Yeah. And rolling out the architecture for how they do that. You know, again, it, to me it's, it's a lot of, it's been focused around how do we do this in the most secure manner possible? How do we deliver the service to them and the most secure managers possible? How do they understand that it, that they can trust the automation and it's doing the right things on their environments, right? So it's not, you know, we're not pushing out or, or you know, it's not making bad policies >>And they're leaning on you guys. >>It's, it's not being putting malware out there, right? At the same time we're doing different things. And so they really rely on, on our customers, rely on us to really help them with that journey. >>I think a, a big part of that with Kendra as such a great partner and so many customers trusting them, is the fact that they really understand that enterprise. And so as, as Scott talks about the security aspect, we're not just talking to the IT operations people, right? We're talking across the enterprise, the security, the infrastructure, and the automation around that. So when we talk about hybrid cloud, we talk about network and security edge is a natural conversation to that, cuz absolutely at the edge network and security automation is critical. Otherwise, how are you gonna manage just the size of your edge as it grows? >>Yeah. And, and we've been, and that's another area that we've been having a a lot more conversations with clients on, is how do you do automation for IOT and edge based devices, right? We, you know, traditionally data center cloud, right? Kind of the core pieces of where we've been focusing on, but I, you know, recently I've been seeing a lot more opportunities and a lot more companies coming forward saying, you know, help us with the network space, help us with the iot space. We really wanna start getting to that level of automation and that part of our environments. And what >>Are some of the key barriers that customers are coming to you with saying, help us overcome these so that they can, you're smiling so that they can, can obviously attract and retain the right talent and also be able to determine what processes to automate to extract the most value and the most ROI for the organization. >>Yeah. And, and, and you know, that's, that's an interesting, the ROI conversation's always an interesting one, right? Because when you start having that with customers, some of the first things they think about, or the first, the natural place people go is, >>Oh, >>Labor takeout. I can do this with less people. Right? But that's not the end all be all of automation. In fact, you know, my personal view is that's, you know, maybe the, the the bottom 30%, right? That's kind of, then you have to think about the value you get above and beyond that standard operations, standardized processes, right? How are you gonna able to do those faster? How's that enabling your business, right? What's all the risks that's now been taken out by having these changes codified, right? By having them done in a manner that is repeatable, scalable, and, and, and really gets them to the point of, you know, what their business needs from an operational standpoint and >>Extracting that value. Nelson, talk about the automation journey from your perspective, How have you seen that evolve from your lens, especially over the last couple of years? >>It's a great question. You know, it's interesting because obviously all of our customers are at different stages of their automation journey. We have someone that just beginning looking at automation, they've been doing old scripts, if you will, the past. And then we have more that are embracing it, right? As a culture. So we have customers that are building cultures of automation, right? They have standups, they have automation guilds. It's, it's kind of a little bit of a, of a click. It's kind of, you know, building up steam in that momentum. And then we have, you know, the clients that Kindra works with, right? And they're very much focused on automation because they understand that they have a lack of resources, they don't have the expertise, they don't have the time to be able to deliver all this. Yeah. And that's really, Kendra really comes into effect to really help those customers accelerate their automation. Yeah. Right. And to that point, you know, we're doing a lot of innovation work with Kendra and we lean on them heavily because, you know, they're willing to make that commitment as a partner both on the, the, the day to day work that we do together as well as Ford looking at different architectures. >>Yeah. And, and the community aspect from our side internally has been tremendous in terms of us being able to expand what we'll be doing with automation and, and what a's been able to do with that community to get there. Right? Yeah. So to last month we did about 33 million day one, day two operations through automation, right? So that's what we've done. If you look at it, you know, if I break it down, it's really 80% of that standard global process stuff that we bring to the table. 20% of that is what our, our account teams are bringing specifically to their clients based on their needs and what they need to get done. Right. You know, one of my favorite examples of of, of this, right? We have a automation example out there for a, a client we've got in Japan, right? They tie, you know, they're, they're obviously concerned, you know, security a everything else that we've been talking about. >>They're also concerned about resiliency, right? In the face of natural disasters. Yeah. So they took our automation, they said, Okay, we're gonna tie your platform to seismic data that's coming through, and we understand what seismic data's happening. Okay, it's hitting a certain event. Let's automatically start kicking off resiliency operations so we can be prepared and thus keeps serving our clients when that's happening. Right? And that's not something like when you talk about a global team coming in and, and saying, we're gonna do all this. It's that community aspect, getting, getting the account focus, getting to that level, right? That's really brings value to clients. And that's one of the use cases, you know, and aaps enabled us to do with the a the community approach. We've got >>Now talk about this partnership. I think earlier when we were talking to Stephanie and Tom, the bottoms up Ansible community with top down kind of business objectives kind of come into play. You guys have a partnership where it's, there's some game changing things happening because Ansible's growing, continuing to have that scope grow from a skill set standpoint, expand the horizons, doing more automation at scale, and then you got business objectives where people wanna move faster in their, in their digital transformation. So to me, it's interesting that this part kind of hits both. >>It does really hit both. I mean, you know, the community cloud that Kendra has is so critical, right? Because they build that c i CF architecture internally, but they follow that community mantra, if you will. And community is so important to us, right? And that's really where we find innovation. So together with what we were call discussing about validated content earlier today becomes critical to build that content to really help people get started, Right? Validated content, content they can depend on and deliver, right? So that becomes critical on the other side, as you mentioned, is the reality of how do we get this done? Yeah. Right? How do we mature, how do we accelerate? And without the ability to drive those solutions to them to fix, if you are the problems that the line of business has. Well, if you don't answer those questions with the innovation, with the community, and then with the ap, it's, it, it does, it's gotta all come >>Together as, I mean, that community framework is interesting. I think we hear a lot in the cube, you know, Hey, let's do this. Sounds good. Who's gonna do it? Someone who's the operator. So there's a little skills gap going on. It's also a transformation in the roles of the operators in particular, and the dev, So the DevOps equation's completely going to the next level, right? And this is where people wanna move faster. So you're seeing a lot more managed services, a lot more Yes. Services that's, I won't say so much top down, but more like, let's do it and here's a play to get it done, right? Then backfill on the hiring, whether it's taking on a little bit of technical debt or going a little faster to get the proof points, >>Right? And I think one of the critical aspects is, you know, Ansible has it certified collections, right? And oftentimes we, we don't, I don't, I meet with customers two, three times a week, right? There's not a single one that doesn't emphasize the importance of partners and the importance of certified collections, Right? And kindra is included in that, right? Because they bring a lot of those certified collections. Use them, leverage them, it's helps customers get a jumpstarter, right? It's a few, it's their easy button, right? But they only get that and they value that because of the support that's there. >>Yeah. Right? They get the with >>The cert. Yeah. I was gonna say, just adding on the certified collections, right? We, so, you know, it was, it was great to see the hub come out with those capabilities because, you know, as we've gone through the last 12 months and, and change, one of the things that we focused more in on is network devices, network support, right? And, and so, you know, some of the certified collections out there for Cisco for F five, right? Some of those things we've been able to take back in and now build on top of with the expertise that we, we have in that space as well. And then use that as a starting point to more value for our clients. >>How is Kentrell working together with, with Red Hat and with Ansible to help organizations like you mentioned Nelson, they're on the journey varies considerably. Some are well on their way, others aren't. But for those to really start developing an automation, first culture, we talked a lot about cultural ship, we talked about it this morning. You can feel the power of that community and driving it, but how do you guys work together to help companies and any industry kind of really start understanding what an automation first culture is and then building it internally and getting some grounds? Well, >>Well, it's interesting, right? One of the, one of the things that really is we found really helpful is assessments, right? So you have silos and pockets of automation, and that's that challenge, right? So to be able to bring that, if you are automation community within an enterprise together, we often go out and we'll do an assessment, right? An automation assessment to really understand holistically how the enterprise could leverage automation not just in the pockets, but to bring it together. And when they bring that automation together, they can share, playbooks can share their experiences, right? And with Kindra and the multiple and the practices they have, right? They really bring that home from an industry perspective. They also bring that home, if you will, from a technology perspective. And they bring that together. So, you know, Kindra in that respect is the glue for our customer success. >>What's news? What's the next big thing that you guys see? Because if this continues down the road, this path, people are gonna get, the winds gonna get the successes. The new beachhead, if you will, is established. You got the edge around the corner. What's next for you guys in the partnership? How do you see it developing? >>No, we're looking at >>No, it's all good. So really, you know, I, I mentioned it earlier and, and the jour the automation journey paralleled by innovation, right? Customers today are automating, they're doing a great job. There's multiple tools out there. We understand we're not gonna be the only tool in the shed, but Ansible can come in and integrate that entire environment. And in a hybrid cloud environment, you want that there, right? I think what next is obviously the hybrid cloud is critical. The edge is critical, right? And I think that, you know, the needs and the requirements that Kindra hears that we have is kind of that future. And, you know, we, we often, often in, in Red Hat, we talk about a north star, right? And when I work with partners, ikin, do we talk about the North Star, where we want to get to? And that is the acceleration of automation. And I think both by the practical aspect of working with our customers and the innovation as partners, as business partners, technology partners will help accelerate >>That. Yeah. Scott, your perspective to bridge to the future is obviously hybrid and edge, how you bringing your customers along? >>Yes. So, so we see, you know, when we talk about my, when I talk about my automation strategy, our automated strategy, right? It's about being automated, orchestrated and intelligent, right? Kind of those, those three layers of the stack. We've been building out a lot of work, what we call our integrated AIOps layer for actionable insights, right? We've got a, you know, a goal to integrate that and, and we have integrated into our automation service for how we're delivering the whole package to our clients so they can better see opportunities for automation. What's the best way to go about it? You know, what are the, what are some of the, the issues they have, vulnerabilities they have in their environment and really bringing it to them in, in a real holistic manner. In fact, we internally, we call it our F five steering wheel, right? Based on the, the race thing, right? >>Because you think about the, the racing cars, f fives know they're right there, right? They got everything they need in front of 'em. Yeah. So our goal is been to, to include that into our automation view and service and build that out, right? So that's one way we're doing it. The additional way is, is through some announcements you probably heard, hopefully heard the last couple weeks through something called Kendra Bridge, right? Kendra Bridge is more the digitization of, of the way we deliver services for our clients to make it easier for them to consume and, and to, to make the barrier to entry for things like getting automation, getting it more in their environment, right? Lower as much as possible, right? So really integrated AIOps kind bridge. Those are really the two ways we see it as, as going forward. >>It's interesting, you know, we live through a lot of these different inflection points in the industry. Every time there's a big inflection point, there's more complexity that needs to be tamed, you know? And so you got innovation. If you got innovation coming and you got the clients wanna simplify and tame the complexity, this is a big part of what you guys do. >>Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, how do we, you know, most, when the clients come to us, right? Like I said, one, it's about trust. They trust us to do it because we can make it easy for them to not have to worry about that, right? Yeah. They don't have to worry about what it takes to secure the environment, manage it, run it, design it, build it for the, the cloud. We give 'em the ability, we give them the ability to focus on their core business while we do the stuff that's important to them, which >>Is absolutely critical that you, you can't emphasize trust in this relationship enough. I wish we had more time, guys, you're gonna have to come back. I think that's basically what this is boil down to. But thanks so much guys for talking with John and me about how Kendra and and Ansible are working together, really enabling your customers to, to unlock the value of automation across their organization and really make some big business changes. We appreciate your insights and your time. Fantastic. Thank you. Happy to do it and happy to do it any time. All right. Our pleasure. Thank you so much for our guests and John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago. This is day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 22. Don't go anywhere. Our next guest joins us in just a minute.

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante >>UI path has always been an unconventional company. You know, it started with humble beginnings. It was essentially a software development shop. And then it caught lightning in a bottle with its computer vision technology. And it's really it's simplification mantra. And it created a very easy to deploy software robot system for bespoke departments. So they could automate mundane tasks. You know, you know, the story, the company grew rapidly was able to go public early this year. Now consistent with its out of the ordinary approach. While other firms are shutting down travel and physical events, UI path is moving ahead with forward for its annual user conference next week with a live audience there at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, it's also fast-forwarding as a company determined to lead the charge beyond RPA and execute on a more all encompassing enterprise automation agenda. Hello everyone. And welcome to this week's Wiki bond Cuban sites powered by ETR in this breaking analysis and a head of forward four we'll update you in the RPA market. >>The progress that UI path has made since its IPO and bringing some ETR customer survey data to contextualize the company's position in the overall market and relative to the competition. Here's a quick rundown of today's agenda. First, I want to tell you the cube is going to be at forward for, at the Bellagio next week, UI paths. This is their big customer event. It's live. It's a physical event. It's primarily outdoors. You have to be vaccinated to attend. Now it's not completely out of the ordinary John furrier and the cube. We're at AWS public sector this past week. And we were at mobile world Congress and one of the first big hybrid events of the year at Barcelona. And we thought that event would kick off the fall event season live event in earnest, but the COVID crisis has caused many tech firms. Most tech firms actually to hit the pause button, not UI path. >>They're moving ahead, they're going forward. And we see a growing trend for smaller VIP events with a virtual component topic, maybe for another day. Now we've talked extensively about the productivity challenges and the automation mandate. The pandemic has thrust upon us. Now we've seen pretty dramatic productivity improvements as remote work kicked in, but it's brought new stresses. For example, according to Qualtrics, 32% of working moms said their mental health has declined since the pandemic hit. 15% of working dads said the same by the way. So one has to question the sustainability of this perpetual Workday, and we're seeing a continuum of automation solutions emerging. And we'll talk about that today. We're seeing tons of MNA, M and a as well, but now in that continuum on the left side of the spectrum, there's Microsoft who in some ways they stand alone and that Azure is becoming ubiquitous as a SAS cloud collaboration and productivity platform. >>Microsoft is everywhere and in virtually every market with their video conferencing security database, cloud CRM, analytics, you name it, Microsoft is pretty much there. And RPA is no different with the acquisition of soft emotive. Last year, Microsoft entered the RTA market in earnest and is penetrating very deeply into the space, particularly as it pertains to personal approach, personal productivity building on its software state. Now in the middle of that spectrum, if you will, we're seeing more M and a, and that's defined really by the big software giants. Think of this domain as integrated software plays SAP, they acquired contexture, uh, uh, they also acquired a company called process insight service now acquired Intella bought Salesforce service trace. We see in for entering the fray. And I, I would put even Pega Pega systems in this camp, software companies focused on integrating RPA into their broader workflows into their software platforms. >>And this is important because these platforms are entrenched. They're walled gardens of sorts and complicated with lots of touchpoints and integration points. And frankly, they're much harder to automate because of their entrenched legacy. Now on the far side of that, spectrum are the horizontal automation players and that's being led by UI path with automate automation anywhere as the number two player in this domain. And I didn't even put blue prism prism in there more M and a recently announced, uh, that Vista is going to acquire them. Vista also owns TIBCO. They're going to merge those two companies, you know, tip goes kind of an integration play. And so again, I'm, I might, I would put them in that, you know, horizontal piece of the spectrum. So with that as background, we're going to look at how UI path has performed since we last covered them at IPO. >>And then we'll bring in some ETR survey data to get the spending view from customers. And then we'll wrap up now just to emphasize the importance of, of automation and the automation mandate mandate. We talk about it all the time in this program, we use this ETR chart. It's a two dimensional view with net score, which is a measure of spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share, which is a proxy for pervasiveness in the dataset. That's on the horizontal axis. Now note that red dotted line at signifies companies with an elevated position on the net score, vertical axis, anything over that is considered pretty good, very good. Now this shows every spending segment within the ETR taxonomy and the four spending categories with the greatest velocity are AI cloud containers and RPA. And they've topped the charts for quite a while. Now they're the only four categories which have sustained above that 40% line consistently throughout the pandemic. >>And even before now, the impressive thing about cloud of course, is it has a spending has both spending momentum on the vertical axis at a very large share of the, of the market share of presence in the dataset. The point is RPA is nascent still. It has an affinity with AI as a means of more intelligently identifying and streamlining process improvements. And so we expect those to, to remain elevated and grow to the right together, UI path pegs it's Tam, total available market at 60 billion. And the reality is that could be understated. Okay. As we reported from the UI path S one analysis, we did pre IPO. The company at that time had an AR annual recurring revenue of $580 million and was growing at 65% annually at nearly 8,000 customers at the time, a thousand of which had an ARR in excess of a hundred K and a net revenue retention, the company had with 145%. >>So let's take a look at the picture six months forward. We mentioned the $60 billion Tam ARR now up over 725 million on its way to a billion ARR holding pretty steady at 60% growth as is an RR net revenue retention, and more than a thousand new customers in 200 more with over a hundred thousand in ARR and a small operating profit, which by the way, exceeded the consensus pretty substantially. Profitability is not shown here and no one seems to care anyway, these days it's all about growing into that Tam. Well, that's a pretty good looking picture. Isn't it? The company had a beat and a raise for the quarter early this month. So looking good, right? Well, you ask how come the stock's not doing better. That's an interesting question. So let's first look at the stocks performance on a relative basis. Here, we show you I pass performance against Pega systems and blue prism. >>The other two publicly traded automation, pure plays, you know, sort of in the case of Pega. So UI path outperformed post its IPO, but since the early summer Pega has been the big winner. Well, UI path slowly decelerated, you see blue prism was the laggard until it was announced. It was in an acquisition talks with a couple of PE firms and the prospects of a bidding war sent that yellow line up. As you can see UI path, as you can see on the inset has a much higher valuation than Pega and way higher than blue prison. Pega. Interestingly is growing revenues nicely at around 40%. And I think what's happening is the street simply wants more, even though UI path beat and raised wall street, still getting comfortable with which is new to the public market game. And the company just needs to demonstrate a track record and build trust. >>There's also some education around billings and multi-year contracts that the company addressed on its last earnings call, but the street was concerned about ARR from new logos. It appears to be slowing down sequentially in a notable decline in billings momentum, which UI pass CEO, CFO addressed on the earnings call saying, look, they don't need to trade margin for prepaid multi-year deals, given the strong cash position while I give anything up. And even though I said, nobody cares about profitability. Well, I guess that's true until you guide for an operating loss. When you've been showing a small profit in recent recent quarters, which you AIPAC did, then all of a sudden people care. So UI path, isn't a bit of an unknown territory to the street and it has a valuation that's pretty rich, very rich, actually at 30 times, a revenue multiple greater than 30 times revenue, multiple. >>So that's why in, in my view, investors are being cautious, but I want to address a dynamic that we've seen with these high growth rocket ship companies, something we talked about with snowflake. And I think you're seeing some of that here with UI paths, different model in the sense that snowflake is pure cloud, but I'm talking about concerns around ARR from new logos and in that growth on a sequential basis. And here's what's happening in my view with UI path, you have a company that started within departments with a small average contract size in ACV, maybe 25,000, maybe 50,000, but not deep six figure deals that wasn't UI paths play it because the company focused so heavily on simplicity and made it really easy to adopt customer saw really fast ROI. I mean breakeven in months. So you very quickly saw expansion into other departments. >>So when ACV started to rise and installations expanded within each customer UI path realized it had to move beyond being a point product. And it started thinking about a platform and making acquisitions like process gold and others, and this marked a much deeper expansion into the customer base. And you can see that here in this UI path, a chart that they shared at their investor deck customers that bought in 2016 and 2017 expanded their they've expanded their spend 15, 13, 15, 18 20 X. So the LTV, the lifetime value of the customer is growing dramatically. And because UI path has focused on simplicity, it has a very facile freemium model, much easier to try before you buy than its competitors. It's CAC, it's customer acquisition costs are likely much lower than some of its peers. And that's a key dynamic. So don't get freaked out by some of those concerns that we raised earlier, because just like snowflake what's happening is the company for sure is gaining new customers. >>Maybe just not at the same rate, but don't miss the forest through the trees. I E they're getting more money from their existing customers, which means retention, loyalty and growth. Speaking of forests, this chart is the dynamic I'm talking about. It's an ETR graphic that shows the components of net score or against spending momentum net score breaks down into five areas that lime green at the top is new additions. Okay? So that's only 11% of the customer mentions by the way, we're talking about more than 125 responses for UI path. So it's meaningful. It's, it's actually larger in this survey, uh, or certainly comparable to Microsoft. So that says something right there. The next bar is the forest green forest. Green is where I want you to focus. That's customer spending 6% or more in the second half of the year, relative to the first half. >>The gray is flat spending, which is quite large, the pink or light red that's spending customer spending 6% or worse. That's a 4% number, but look at the bottom bar. There is no bar that's churn. 0% of the respondents in the survey are churning and churn is the silent killer of SAS companies, 0% defections. So you've got 46% spending, more nobody leaving. That's the dynamic that is powering UI path right now. And I would take this picture any day over a larger lime green and a smaller forest green and a bigger churn number. Okay. So it's pretty good. It's not snowflake good, but it's solid. So how does this picture compare to UI pass peers? Well, let's take a look at that. So this is ETR data, same data showing the granularity net score for Microsoft power, automate UI path automation, anywhere blue prism and Pega. >>So as we said before, Microsoft is ubiquitous. What can we say about that? But UI path is right there with a more robust platform, not to overlook Microsoft. You can't, but UI path, it'll tell you that they don't compete head to head for enterprise automation deals with Microsoft. Now, maybe they will over time. They do however, compete head to head with automation anywhere. And their picture is quite strong. As you can see here, it has this blue Prism's picture and even Pega, although blue prism, automation, anywhere UI path and power automate all have net scores on this chart. As you can see the table in the upper right over 40% Pega does not. But again, we don't see Pega as a pure play RPA vendor. It's a little bit of sort of apples and oranges there, but they do sell RPA and ETR captures in their taxonomy. >>So why not include them also note that UI path has, as I said before, more mentions in the survey than power automate, which is actually quite interesting, given the ubiquity of Microsoft. Now, one other notable notable note is the bright red that's defections and only UI path is showing zero defections. Everybody else has at least even of the slim, some defections. Okay. So take that as you will, but it's another data 0.1. That's powerful, not only for UI path, but really for the entire sector. Now, the last ETR data point that we want to share is our famous two dimensional view. Like the sector chart we showed earlier, this graphic shows net score on the vertical axis. That's against spending velocity and market share or pervasiveness on the horizontal axis. So as we said earlier, UI path actually has greater presence in the survey than the ever-present Microsoft. >>Remember, this is the July survey. We don't have full results from the September, October survey yet. And we can't release them until ETR is out of its quiet period. But I expect the entire sector, like everything is going to be slightly down because as we reported last week, tech spending is moderated slightly in the second half of this year, but we don't expect the picture to change dramatically. UI path and power automate, we think are going to lead and market presence in those two plus automation anywhere are going to show strength and spending momentum as well. Most of the sector. And we'll see who comes in above the 40% line. Okay. What to watch at forward four. So in summary, I'll be looking for a few things. One UI path has hinted toward a big platform announcement that will deepen its capabilities to go beyond being an RPA point tool into much more of an enterprise automation platform rewriting a lot of the code Linux cloud, better automation of the UI. >>You're going to hear all kinds of new product announcements that are coming. So I'll be listening for those details. I want to hear more from customers to further confirm what I've been hearing from them over the last couple of years and get more data, especially on that ROI on that land and expand. I want to understand that dynamic and that true enterprise automation. It's going to be good to get an update face to face and test some of our assumptions here and see where the gaps are and where UI path can improve. Third. I want to talk to ecosystem players to see where they are in participating in the value chain here. What kind of partner has UI path become since it's IPO? Are they investing more in the ecosystem? How to partners fit into that flywheel fourth, I want to hear from UI path management, Daniel DNAs, and other UI path leaders, they're exiting toddler Ville and coming into an adolescent phase or early adulthood. >>And what does that progression look like? How does it feel? What's the vibe at the show. And finally, I'm very excited to participate in a live in-person event to see what's working, see how a hybrid events are evolving. We got a good glimpse at mobile world Congress and this week, and, uh, in DC and public sector summit, here's, you know, the cube has been doing hybrid events for years, and we intend to continue to lead in this regard and bring you the best, real time information as possible. Okay. That's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you do is search braking analysis podcast. We publish each week on Wiki bond.com and siliconangle.com. And you can always connect on twitter@devolanteoremailmeatdaviddotvolanteatsiliconangle.com. Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn. And don't forget to check out E T r.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Volante for the cube insights powered by ETR be well, and we'll see you next time.

>> From The Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from The Cube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> UiPath has always been an unconventional company. You know it started with humble beginnings. It's essentially a software development shop. Then it caught lightning in a bottle with its computer vision technology. It's really, it's simplification mantra and it created a very easy to deploy software robot system for bespoke departments so they could automate mundane tasks. You know the story. The company grew rapidly, was able to go public early this year. Now consistent with its out-of-the-ordinary approach, while other firms are shutting down travel and physical events, UiPath is moving ahead with Forward IV, it's annual user conference next week with a live audience there at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. It's also fast forwarding as a company, determined to lead the charge beyond RPA and execute on a more all-encompassing Enterprise automation agenda. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Wikibond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis and ahead of Forward IV, we'll update you in the RPA market the progress that UiPath has made since its IPO and bringing some ETR customer survey data that's contextualized the company's position in the overall market and relative to the competition. Here's a quick rundown of today's agenda. First I want to tell you theCube is going to be at Forward IV at the Bellagio next week. UiPath, this is their big customer event. It's live, it's a physical event. It's primarily outdoors. You have to be vaccinated to attend. Now, this not completely out of the ordinary. John Furrier and theCube were at AWS Public Sector this past week and we were at Mobile World Congress in one of the first big hybrid events of the year at Barcelona. We thought that event would kick of the fall event season, live event in earnest but the COVID crisis has caused many tech firms, most tech firms actually, to hit pause button. Not UiPath, they're moving ahead. They're going forward and we see a growing trend for smaller VIP events with a virtual component, topic maybe for another day. Now we've talked extensively about the productivity challenges and the automation mandate the pandemic has thrust upon us. Now, we've seen pretty dramatic productivity improvements as remote work kicked in but its brought new stresses. For example, according to Qualtrics, 32% of working moms said their mental health has declined since the pandemic hit. 15% of working dads said the same by the way. So, one has to question the sustainability of this perpetual workday. And we're seeing a continuum of automation solutions emerging and we'll talk about that today. We're seeing tons of M&A as well but now, in that continuum, on the left-side of the spectrum, there's Microsoft who in some ways, they stand alone and their Azure is becoming ubiquitous as a SaaS-Cloud collaboration and productivity platform. Microsoft is everywhere and in virtually every market, whether video conferencing, security, database, cloud, CRM, analytics, you name it. Microsoft is pretty much there and RPA is no different. With the acquisition of Softomotive last year, Microsoft entered the RTA market in earnest and is penetrating very deeply into the space, particularly as it pertains to personal productivity building on its software stake. Now in the middle of that spectrum if you will, we're seeing more M&A and that's defined really by the big software giants. Think of this domain as integrated software place. SAP, they acquired Contextere. They also acquired a company called Process Insights, Service now acquired Inttellebot. Salesforce acquired Servicetrace, we see Infor entering the frame and I would put even Pega, Pega systems in this camp. Software companies focused on integrating RPA into their broader workflows, into their software platforms and this is important because these platforms are entrenched Their well guardants of thoughts and complicated with lots of touchpoints and integration points and frankly they are much harder to automate because of their entrenched legacy. Now, on the far side of that spectrum, are the horizontal automation players and that's been let by UiPath with automation anywhere as the number two player in this domain. And I even put a blue prism in there more M&A recently announced that Vista is going to acquire them Vista also owns Tibco, they are going to merge those two companies. You know Tibco is come up with the integration play. So again I would put them in that you know, horizontal piece of the spectrum. So with that as background, we're going to look at how UiPath has performed since we last covered them and IPO and I'm going to bring in some ETR survey data to get the spending view from customers and we'll wrap up. Now, just to emphasize the importance of automation and the automation mandate, we talk about it all the time in this program. We use this ETR chart. It's a two dimensional view with net score which is the measure of spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share which is a proxy for pervasiveness in the data set that's on the horizontal axis. Now note that red dotted line, it signifies companies within elevated position on the net score vertical axis anything over that is considered pretty good. Very good. Now this shows every spending segment within the ETR taxonomy. And the four spending categories with the greatest velocity are AI, cloud, containers and RPA. And they have topped the charts for quite a while now. They are the only 4 categories which have sustained above that 40% line consistently throughout the pandemic and even before. Now the impressive thing about cloud of course is it has both spending momentum on the vertical axis and a very large market share or presence in the data set. The point is RPA is nascent still. It has an affinity with AI as a means of more intelligently identifying and streamlining process improvements. And so we expect those two to remain elevated and grow to the right together. UiPath pegs its TAM, total available market at 60 billion. And the reality is that could be understated. Okay, as we reported from the UiPath S1 analysis we did pre IPO, the company at that time had an ARR annual recurring revenue of $580 million and it was growing at 65% annually. And nearly 8000 customers at the time, a 1000 of which had an ARR in excess of a 100k. And the net revenue retention the company had was over 145%. So let's take a look at the pictures 6 months forward. We mentioned the $60 billion TAM, ARR now up over $726.5 million on its way to a billion ARR holding pretty steady at 60% growth as is NRR, net revenue retention and more then a 1000 new customers and 200 more with over a 100000 in ARR and a small operating profit which by the way exceeded the consensuses pretty substantially. Profitability is not shown here and no one seems to care anyway these days. It's all about growing into that TAM. Well that's a pretty good looking picture, isn't it? The company had a beat and a raise for the quarter earlier this month, so looking good right. Well you ask how come the stock is not doing better. That's an interesting question. So let's first look at the stocks performance on a relative basis. Here we show UiPath performance against Pega systems and blue prism, the other two publicly traded automation. Pure plays sort of in the case of Pega. So UiPath outperformed post its IPO but since the early summer Pega is been the big winner while UiPath slowly decelerated. You see Blue prism was at the lag until it was announced that it was in an acquisition talks with a couple of PE firms and the prospects of a bidding war sent that yellow line up as you can see. UiPath as you can see on the inset, has a much higher valuation than Pega and way higher than blue Prism. Pega interestingly is growing revenues nicely at around 40%. And I think what's happening is that the street simply wants more. Even though UiPath beat and raised, Wallstreet is still getting comfortable with management which is new to the public market game and the company just needs to demonstrate a track record and build trust. There's also some education around billings and multi-year contracts that the company addressed on its last earnings call. But the street was concerned about ARR for new logos. It appears to be slowing down sequentially and a notable decline in billings momentum which UiPath CFO addressed on the earnings call saying look they don't need the trade margin for prepaid multi year deals, given the strong cash position. Why give anything up. And even though I said nobody cares about profitability well, I guess that's true until you guide for an operating loss when you've been showing small profit in recent quarters what UiPath did. Then, obviously people start to care. So UiPath is in bit of an unknown territory to the street and it has a valuation, it's pretty rich. Very rich actually at 30 times revenue multiple or greater than 30 times revenue multiple. So that's why in my view, investors are being cautious. But I want to address a dynamic that we have seen with this high growth rocket chip companies. Something we talked about Snowflake and I think you are seeing some of that here with UiPath. Different model in the sense that Snowflake is pure cloud but I'm talking about concerns around ARR and from new logos and that growth in a sequential basis. And here's what's happening in my view with UiPath. You have a company that started within departments with a smaller average contract size, ACV maybe 25000, may be 50000 but not deep six figure deals. That wasn't UiPath's play. And because the company focused so heavily on simplicity and made it really easy to adapt, customers saw really fast ROI. I mean break-even in months. So we very quickly saw expansion into other departments. So when ACV started to rise and installations expanded within each customer, UiPath realized it had to move beyond a point product and it started thing about a platform and making acquisitions like Processgold and others and this marked a much deeper expansion into the customer base. And you can see that here in this UiPath chart that they shared at their investor deck, customers that bought in 2016 and 2017 expanded their spend 13, 15, 18, 20x So the LTV, life time value of the customer is growing dramatically and because UiPath is focused on simplicity, and has a very facile premium model much easier to try before you buy than its competitors it's CAC, Customer acquisition cost are likely much lower than some of its peers. And that's a key dynamic. So don't get freaked out by some of those concerns that we raised earlier because just like Snowflake what's happening is that the company for sure is gaining new customers, may be just not at the same rate but don't miss the forest through the trees I.e getting more money from their existing customers which means retention, loyalty and growth. Now speaking of forest, this chart is the dynamic I'm talking about, its an ETR graphic that shows the components of net score against spending momentum. Net score breaks down into 5 areas. That lime green at the top is new additions. Okay, so that's only 11% of the customer mentions. By the way we are talking about more than a 125 responses for UiPath. So it's meaningful, it's actually larger in this survey or certainly comparable to Microsoft. So that's just something right there. The next bar is the forest green. Forest green is what I want you to focus. That's customer spending 6% or more in the second half of the year relative to the first half. The gray is flat spending which is quite large. The pink or light red, that's spending customers spending 6% or worse, that's a 4% number. But look at the bottom bar. There is no bar, that's churn. 0% of the responders in the survey are churning. And Churn is the silent killer of SaaS companies. 0% defections. So you've got 46% spending more, nobody leaving. That's the dynamic powering UiPath right now and I would take this picture any day over a larger lime green and a smaller forest green and a bigger churn number. Okay, it's pretty good, not Snowflake good but it's solid. So how does this picture compare to UiPath's peers. Let's take a look at that. So this is ETR data, same data showing the granularity net score for Microsoft power automate, UiPath automation anywhere, Blue Prism and Pega. So as we said before, Microsoft is ubiquitous. What can we say about that. But UiPath is right there with a more robust platform. Not to overlook Microsoft, you can't but UiPath will you that the don't compete head to head for enterprise automation deals with Microsoft and may be they will over time. They do however compete head to head with automation anywhere. And their picture is quite strong as you can see here. You know as is Blue Prism's picture and even Pega. Although Blue Prism automation anywhere UiPtah and power automate all have net scores on this chart as you can see the tables in the upper right over 40%, Pega does not. But you can see Pega as a pure play RPA vendor it's a little bit of sort of apples and oranges there but they do sell RPA and ETR captures in their taxonomy so why not include them. Also note that UiPath has as I said before more mentions in the survey than power automate which is actually quite interesting given the ubiquity of Microsoft. Now, one other notable note is the bright red that's defections and only UiPath is showing zero defections Everybody else has at least little of the slims on defections. Okay, so take that as you will but its another data point, the one that is powerful nit only for UiPath but really for the entire sector. Now the last ETR data point that we want to share is the famous two dimensional view. Like the sector chart we showed earlier, this graphic shows the net score on the vertical axis that's against spending velocity and market share or pervasiveness on the horizontal axis. So as we said earlier, UiPath actually has a greater presence in the survey than the ever present Microsoft. Remember, this is the July survey. We don't have full results from the September-October survey yet and we can't release them until ETR is out of its quiet period but I expect the entire sector, like everything is going to be slightly down because as reported last week tech spending is moderated slightly in the second half of this year. But we don't expect the picture to change dramatically UiPath and power automate we think are going to lead in market presence and those two plus automation anywhere is going to show the strength in spending momentum as will most of the sector. We'll see who comes in above the 40% line. Okay, what to watch at Forward IV. So in summary I'll be looking for a few things. One, UiPath has hinted toward a big platform announcement that will deepen its capabilities to beyond being an RPA point tool into much more of an enterprise automation platform, rewriting a lot of the code Linux, cloud, better automation of the UI, you are going to hear all kind of new product announcements that are coming so I'll be listening for those details. I want to hear more from customers that further confirm what I've been hearing from them over the last couple of years and get more data especially on their ROI, on their land and expand, I want to understand that dynamic and that true enterprise automation. It's going to be good to get an update face to face and test some of our assumptions here and see where the gaps are and where UiPath can improve. Third, I want to talk to ecosystem players to see where they are in participating in the value chain here. What kind of partner has UiPath become since its IPO, are they investing more in the ecosystem, how do partners fit into that flywheel. Fourth, I want to hear from UiPath management Daniel Dines and other UiPath leaders, their exiting toddler wheel and coming into an adolescence phase or early adulthood. And what does that progression look like, how does it feel, what's the vibe at the show. And finally I'm very excited to participate in a live in-person event to see what's working, to see how hybrid events are evolving, we got to good glimpse at Mobile congress and this week in DC at public sector summit. As you know theCube is doing hybrid events for years and we intend to continue to lead in this regard and bring you the best real time information as possible. Okay, that's it for today. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, all you do is search breaking analysis podcast. We publish each week on Wikibound.com and Siliconangle.com and you can always connect on twitter @dvellante or email me at David.vellante@siliconangle.com Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCube insights powered by ETR. Be well and will see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe, but it's the cube presenting active DQ, intelligent automation for data quality brought to you by IO Tahoe. >>Now we're going to look at the role automation plays in mobilizing your data on snowflake. Let's welcome. And Duncan Turnbull who's partner sales engineer at snowflake and AIG Vihara is back CEO of IO. Tahoe is going to share his insight. Gentlemen. Welcome. >>Thank you, David. Good to have you back. Yeah, it's great to have you back >>A J uh, and it's really good to CIO Tao expanding the ecosystem so important. Um, now of course bringing snowflake and it looks like you're really starting to build momentum. I mean, there's progress that we've seen every month, month by month, over the past 12, 14 months, your seed investors, they gotta be happy. >>They are all that happy. And then I can see that we run into a nice phase of expansion here and new customers signing up. And now you're ready to go out and raise that next round of funding. I think, um, maybe think of a slight snowflake five years ago. So we're definitely on track with that. A lot of interest from investors and, um, we're right now trying to focus in on those investors that can partner with us, understand AI data and, and automation. >>So personally, I mean, you've managed a number of early stage VC funds. I think four of them, uh, you've taken several comp, uh, software companies through many funding rounds and growth and all the way to exit. So, you know how it works, you have to get product market fit, you know, you gotta make sure you get your KPIs, right. And you gotta hire the right salespeople, but, but what's different this time around, >>Uh, well, you know, the fundamentals that you mentioned though, those are never change. And, um, what we can say, what I can say that's different, that's shifted, uh, this time around is three things. One in that they used to be this kind of choice of, do we go open source or do we go proprietary? Um, now that has turned into, um, a nice hybrid model where we've really keyed into, um, you know, red hat doing something similar with Santos. And the idea here is that there is a core capability of technology that independence a platform, but it's the ability to then build an ecosystem around that made a pervade community. And that community may include customers, uh, technology partners, other tech vendors, and enabling the platform adoption so that all of those folks in that community can build and contribute, um, while still maintaining the core architecture and platform integrity, uh, at the core of it. >>And that's one thing that's changed was fitting a lot of that type of software company, um, emerge into that model, which is different from five years ago. Um, and then leveraging the cloud, um, every cloud snowflake cloud being one of them here in order to make use of what customers, uh, and customers and enterprise software are moving towards. Uh, every CIO is now in some configuration of a hybrid. Um, it is state whether those cloud multi-cloud on prem. That's just the reality. The other piece is in dealing with the CIO is legacy. So the past 15, 20 years they've purchased many different platforms, technologies, and some of those are still established and still, how do you, um, enable that CIO to make purchase while still preserving and in some cases building on and extending the, the legacy, um, material technology. So they've invested their people's time and training and financial investment into solving a problem, customer pain point, uh, with technology, but, uh, never goes out of fashion >>That never changes. You have to focus like a laser on that. And of course, uh, speaking of companies who are focused on solving problems, don't can turn bill from snowflake. You guys have really done a great job and really brilliantly addressing pain points, particularly around data warehousing, simplified that you're providing this new capability around data sharing, uh, really quite amazing. Um, Dunkin AAJ talks about data quality and customer pain points, uh, in, in enterprise. It, why is data quality been such a problem historically? >>Oh, sorry. One of the biggest challenges that's really affected by it in the past is that because to address everyone's need for using data, they've evolved all these kinds of different places to store all these different silos or data marts or all this kind of clarification of places where data lives and all of those end up with slightly different schedules to bringing data in and out. They end up with slightly different rules for transforming that data and formatting it and getting it ready and slightly different quality checks for making use of it. And this then becomes like a big problem in that these different teams are then going to have slightly different or even radically different ounces to the same kinds of questions, which makes it very hard for teams to work together, uh, on their different data problems that exist inside the business, depending on which of these silos they end up looking at and what you can do. If you have a single kind of scalable system for putting all of your data into it, you can kind of sidestep along to this complexity and you can address the data quality issues in a, in a single and a single way. >>Now, of course, we're seeing this huge trend in the market towards robotic process automation, RPA, that adoption is accelerating. Uh, you see, in UI paths, I IPO, you know, 35 plus billion dollars, uh, valuation, you know, snowflake like numbers, nice cops there for sure. Uh, agent you've coined the phrase data RPA, what is that in simple terms? >>Yeah, I mean, it was born out of, uh, seeing how in our ecosystem concern community developers and customers, uh, general business users for wanting to adopt and deploy a tar hose technology. And we could see that, um, I mean, there's not monkeying out PA we're not trying to automate that piece, but wherever there is a process that was tied into some form of a manual overhead with handovers and so on. Um, that process is something that we were able to automate with, with our ties technology and, and the deployment of AI and machine learning technologies specifically to those data processes almost as a precursor to getting into financial automation that, um, that's really where we're seeing the momentum pick up, especially in the last six months. And we've kept it really simple with snowflake. We've kind of stepped back and said, well, you know, the resource that a snowflake can leverage here is, is the metadata. So how could we turn snowflake into that repository of being the data catalog? And by the way, if you're a CIO looking to purchase a data catalog tool stop, there's no need to, um, working with snowflake, we've enable that intelligence to be gathered automatically and to be put, to use within snowflake. So reducing that manual effort, and I'm putting that data to work. And, um, and that's where we've packaged this with, uh, AI machine learning specific to those data tasks. Um, and it made sense that's, what's resonated with, with our customers. >>You know, what's interesting here, just a quick aside, as you know, I've been watching snowflake now for awhile and, and you know, of course the, the competitors come out and maybe criticize why they don't have this feature. They don't have that feature. And it's snowflake seems to have an answer. And the answer oftentimes is, well, its ecosystem ecosystem is going to bring that because we have a platform that's so easy to work with though. So I'm interested Duncan in what kind of collaborations you are enabling with high quality data. And of course, you know, your data sharing capability. >>Yeah. So I think, uh, you know, the ability to work on, on datasets, isn't just limited to inside the business itself or even between different business units. And we were kind of discussing maybe with their silos. Therefore, when looking at this idea of collaboration, we have these where we want to be >>Able to exploit data to the greatest degree possible, but we need to maintain the security, the safety, the privacy, and governance of that data. It could be quite valuable. It could be quite personal depending on the application involved. One of these novel applications that we see between organizations of data sharing is this idea of data clean rooms. And these data clean rooms are safe, collaborative spaces, which allow multiple companies or even divisions inside a company where they have particular, uh, privacy requirements to bring two or more data sets together for analysis. But without having to actually share the whole unprotected data set with each other, and this lets you to, you know, when you do this inside of snowflake, you can collaborate using standard tool sets. You can use all of our SQL ecosystem. You can use all of the data science ecosystem that works with snowflake. >>You can use all of the BI ecosystem that works with snowflake, but you can do that in a way that keeps the confidentiality that needs to be presented inside the data intact. And you can only really do these kinds of, uh, collaborations, especially across organization, but even inside large enterprises, when you have good reliable data to work with, otherwise your analysis just isn't going to really work properly. A good example of this is one of our large gaming customers. Who's an advertiser. They were able to build targeting ads to acquire customers and measure the campaign impact in revenue, but they were able to keep their data safe and secure while doing that while working with advertising partners, uh, the business impact of that was they're able to get a lifted 20 to 25% in campaign effectiveness through better targeting and actually, uh, pull through into that of a reduction in customer acquisition costs because they just didn't have to spend as much on the forms of media that weren't working for them. >>So, ha I wonder, I mean, you know, with, with the way public policy shaping out, you know, obviously GDPR started it in the States, you know, California, consumer privacy act, and people are sort of taking the best of those. And, and, and there's a lot of differentiation, but what are you seeing just in terms of, you know, the government's really driving this, this move to privacy, >>Um, government public sector, we're seeing a huge wake up an activity and, uh, across the whole piece that, um, part of it has been data privacy. Um, the other part of it is being more joined up and more digital rather than paper or form based. Um, we've all got stories of waiting in line, holding a form, taking that form to the front of the line and handing it over a desk. Now government and public sector is really looking to transform their services into being online, to show self service. Um, and that whole shift is then driving the need to, um, emulate a lot of what the commercial sector is doing, um, to automate their processes and to unlock the data from silos to put through into those, uh, those processes. Um, and another thing I can say about this is they, the need for data quality is as a Dunkin mentions underpins all of these processes, government pharmaceuticals, utilities, banking, insurance, the ability for a chief marketing officer to drive a, a loyalty campaign. >>They, the ability for a CFO to reconcile accounts at the end of the month. So do a, a, uh, a quick, accurate financial close. Um, also the, the ability of a customer operations to make sure that the customer has the right details about themselves in the right, uh, application that they can sell. So from all of that is underpinned by data and is effective or not based on the quality of that data. So whilst we're mobilizing data to snowflake cloud, the ability to then drive analytics, prediction, business processes off that cloud, um, succeeds or fails on the quality of that data. >>I mean it, and, you know, I would say, I mean, it really is table stakes. If you don't trust the data, you're not gonna use the data. The problem is it always takes so long to get to the data quality. There's all these endless debates about it. So we've been doing a fair amount of work and thinking around this idea of decentralized data, data by its very nature is decentralized, but the fault domains of traditional big data is that everything is just monolithic and the organizations monolithic technology's monolithic, the roles are very, you know, hyper specialized. And so you're hearing a lot more these days about this notion of a data fabric or what calls a data mesh. Uh, and we've kind of been leaning in to that and the ability to, to connect various data capabilities, whether it's a data warehouse or a data hub or a data Lake that those assets are discoverable, they're shareable through API APIs and they're governed on a federated basis. And you're using now bringing in a machine intelligence to improve data quality. You know, I wonder Duncan, if you could talk a little bit about Snowflake's approach to this topic. >>Sure. So I'd say that, you know, making use of all of your data, is there a key kind of driver behind these ideas that they can mesh into the data fabrics? And the idea is that you want to bring together not just your kind of strategic data, but also your legacy data and everything that you have inside the enterprise. I think I'd also like to kind of expand upon what a lot of people view as all of the data. And I think that a lot of people kind of miss that there's this whole other world of data they could be having access to, which is things like data from their business partners, their customers, their suppliers, and even stuff that's more in the public domain, whether that's, you know, demographic data or geographic or all these kinds of other types of data sources. And what I'd say to some extent is that the data cloud really facilitates the ability to share and gain access to this both kind of between organizations inside organizations. >>And you don't have to, you know, make lots of copies of the data and kind of worry about the storage and this federated, um, you know, idea of governance and all these things that it's quite complex to kind of manage this. Uh, you know, the snowflake approach really enables you to share data with your ecosystem all the world, without any latency with full control over what's shared without having to introduce new complexities or having complex attractions with APIs or software integration. The simple approach that we provide allows a relentless focus on creating the right data product to meet the challenges facing your business today. >>So, Andrea, the key here is to don't get to talking about it in my mind. Anyway, my cake takeaway is to simplicity. If you can take the complexity out of the equation, we're going to get more adoption. It really is that simple. >>Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that that whole journey, maybe five, six years ago, the adoption of data lakes was, was a stepping stone. Uh, however, the Achilles heel there was, you know, the complexity that it shifted towards consuming that data from a data Lake where there were many, many sets of data, um, to, to be able to cure rate and to, um, to consume, uh, whereas actually, you know, the simplicity of being able to go to the data that you need to do your role, whether you're in tax compliance or in customer services is, is key. And, you know, listen for snowflake by auto. One thing we know for sure is that our customers are super small and they're very capable. They're they're data savvy and know, want to use whichever tool and embrace whichever, um, cloud platform that is gonna reduce the barriers to solving. What's complex about that data, simplifying that and using, um, good old fashioned SQL, um, to access data and to build products from it to exploit that data. So, um, simplicity is, is key to it to allow people to, to, to make use of that data. And CIO is recognize that >>So Duncan, the cloud obviously brought in this notion of dev ops, um, and new methodologies and things like agile that brought that's brought in the notion of data ops, which is a very hot topic right now. Um, basically dev ops applies to data about how D how does snowflake think about this? How do you facilitate that methodology? >>Yeah, sorry. I agree with you absolutely. That they drops takes these ideas of agile development of >>Agile delivery and of the kind of dev ops world that we've seen just rise and rise, and it applies them to the data pipeline, which is somewhere where it kind of traditionally hasn't happened. And it's the same kinds of messages as we see in the development world, it's about delivering faster development, having better repeatability and really getting towards that dream of the data-driven enterprise, you know, where you can answer people's data questions, they can make better business decisions. And we have some really great architectural advantages that allow us to do things like allow cloning of data sets without having to copy them, allows us to do things like time travel so we can see what data looked like at some point in the past. And this lets you kind of set up both your own kind of little data playpen as a clone without really having to copy all of that data. >>So it's quick and easy, and you can also, again, with our separation of storage and compute, you can provision your own virtual warehouse for dev usage. So you're not interfering with anything to do with people's production usage of this data. So the, these ideas, the scalability, it just makes it easy to make changes, test them, see what the effect of those changes are. And we've actually seen this. You were talking a lot about partner ecosystems earlier. Uh, the partner ecosystem has taken these ideas that are inside snowflake and they've extended them. They've integrated them with, uh, dev ops and data ops tooling. So things like version control and get an infrastructure automation and things like Terraform. And they've kind of built that out into more of a data ops products that, that you can, you can make yourself so we can see there's a huge impact of, of these ideas coming into the data world. >>We think we're really well-placed to take advantage to them. The partner ecosystem is doing a great job with doing that. And it really allows us to kind of change that operating model for data so that we don't have as much emphasis on like hierarchy and change windows and all these kinds of things that are maybe use as a lot of fashioned. And we kind of taking the shift from this batch data integration into, you know, streaming continuous data pipelines in the cloud. And this kind of gets you away from like a once a week or once a month change window, if you're really unlucky to, you know, pushing changes, uh, in a much more rapid fashion as the needs of the business change. >>I mean, those hierarchical organizational structures, uh, w when we apply those to begin to that, what it actually creates the silos. So if you're going to be a silo Buster, which aji look at you guys in silo busters, you've got to put data in the hands of the domain experts, the business people, they know what data they want, if they have to go through and beg and borrow for a new data sets, et cetera. And so that's where automation becomes so key. And frankly, the technology should be an implementation detail, not the dictating factor. I wonder if you could comment on this. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, making the, the technologies more accessible to the general business users >>Or those specialists business teams that, um, that's the key to unlocking is it is interesting to see is as people move from organization to organization where they've had those experiences operating in a hierarchical sense, I want to break free from that and, um, or have been exposed to, um, automation, continuous workflows, um, change is continuous in it. It's continuous in business, the market's continuously changing. So having that flow across the organization of work, using key components, such as get hub, similar to what you drive process Terraform to build in, um, code into the process, um, and automation and with a high Tahoe leveraging all the metadata from across those fragmented sources is, is, is good to say how those things are coming together. And watching people move from organization to organization say, Hey, okay, I've got a new start. I've got my first hundred days to impress my, my new manager. >>Uh, what kind of an impact can I, um, bring to this? And quite often we're seeing that as, you know, let me take away the good learnings from how to do it, or how not to do it from my previous role. And this is an opportunity for me to, to bring in automation. And I'll give you an example, David, you know, recently started working with a, a client in financial services. Who's an asset manager, uh, managing financial assets. They've grown over the course of the last 10 years through M and a, and each of those acquisitions have bought with it tactical data. It's saying instead of data of multiple CRM systems now multiple databases, multiple bespoke in-house created applications. And when the new CIO came in and had a look at those well, you know, yes, I want to mobilize my data. Yes, I need to modernize my data state because my CEO is now looking at these crypto assets that are on the horizon and the new funds that are emerging that around digital assets and crypto assets. >>But in order to get to that where absolutely data underpins and is the core asset, um, cleaning up that, that legacy situation mobilizing the relevant data into the Safelite cloud platform, um, is where we're giving time back, you know, that is now taking a few weeks, whereas that transitioned to mobilize that data, start with that, that new clean slate to build upon a new business as a, a digital crypto asset manager, as well as the legacy, traditional financial assets, bonds stocks, and fixed income assets, you name it, uh, is where we're starting to see a lot of innovation. >>Yeah. Tons of innovation. I love the crypto examples and FTS are exploding and, you know, let's face it, traditional banks are getting disrupted. Uh, and so I also love this notion of data RPA. I, especially because I've done a lot of work in the RPA space. And, and I want to, what I would observe is that the, the early days of RPA, I call it paving the cow path, taking existing processes and applying scripts, get letting software robots, you know, do its thing. And that was good because it reduced, you know, mundane tasks, but really where it's evolved is a much broader automation agenda. People are discovering new, new ways to completely transform their processes. And I see a similar, uh, analogy for data, the data operating model. So I'm wonder whenever you think about that, how a customer really gets started bringing this to their ecosystem, their data life cycles. >>Sure. Yeah. So step one is always the same is figuring out for the CIO, the chief data officer, what data do I have, um, and that's increasingly something that they want towards a mate, so we can help them there and, and do that automated data discovery, whether that is documents in the file, share backup archive in a relational data store, in a mainframe really quickly hydrating that and bringing that intelligence, the forefront of, of what do I have, and then it's the next step of, well, okay. Now I want to continually monitor and curate that intelligence with the platform that I've chosen. Let's say snowflake, um, in order such that I can then build applications on top of that platform to serve my, my internal, external customer needs and the automation around classifying data reconciliation across different fragmented data silos, building that in those insights into snowflake. >>Um, as you say, a little later on where we're talking about data quality, active DQ, allowing us to reconcile data from different sources, as well as look at the integrity of that data. Um, so they can go on to remediation, you know, I, I wanna, um, harness and leverage, um, techniques around traditional RPA. Um, but to get to that stage, I need to fix the data. So remediating publishing the data in snowflake, uh, allowing analysis to be formed performance snowflake. Th those are the key steps that we see and just shrinking that timeline into weeks, giving the organization that time back means they're spending more time on their customer and solving their customer's problem, which is where we want them to be. >>This is the brilliance of snowflake actually, you know, Duncan is, I've talked to him, then what does your view about this and your other co-founders and it's really that focus on simplicity. So, I mean, that's, you, you picked a good company to join my opinion. So, um, I wonder if you could, you know, talk about some of the industry sectors that are, again, going to gain the most from, from data RPA, I mean, traditional RPA, if I can use that term, you know, a lot of it was back office, a lot of, you know, financial w what are the practical applications where data RPA is going to impact, you know, businesses and, and the outcomes that we can expect. >>Yes, sir. So our drive is, is really to, to make that, um, business general user's experience of RPA simpler and, and using no code to do that, uh, where they've also chosen snowflake to build that their cloud platform. They've got the combination then of using a relatively simple script scripting techniques, such as SQL, uh, without no code approach. And the, the answer to your question is whichever sector is looking to mobilize their data. Uh, it seems like a cop-out, but to give you some specific examples, David, um, in banking where, uh, customers are looking to modernize their banking systems and enable better customer experience through, through applications and digital apps. That's where we're, we're seeing a lot of traction, uh, and this approach to, to pay RPA to data, um, health care, where there's a huge amount of work to do to standardize data sets across providers, payers, patients, uh, and it's an ongoing, um, process there for, for retail, um, helping to, to build that immersive customer experience. >>So recommending next best actions, um, providing an experience that is going to drive loyalty and retention, that's, that's dependent on understanding what that customer's needs intent, uh, being out to provide them with the content or the outfit at that point in time, or all data dependent utilities is another one great overlap there with, with snowflake where, you know, helping utilities, telecoms energy, water providers to build services on that data. And this is where the ecosystem just continues to, to expand. If we, if we're helping our customers turn their data into services for, for their ecosystem, that's, that's exciting. And they were more so exciting than insurance, which we always used to, um, think back to, uh, when insurance used to be very dull and mundane, actually, that's where we're seeing a huge amounts of innovation to create new flexible products that are priced to the day to the situation and, and risk models being adaptive when the data changes, uh, on, on events or circumstances. So across all those sectors that they're all mobilizing that data, they're all moving in some way, shape or form to a, a multi-cloud, um, set up with their it. And I think with, with snowflake and without Tahoe, being able to accelerate that and make that journey simple and as complex is, uh, is why we found such a good partner here. >>All right. Thanks for that. And then thank you guys. Both. We gotta leave it there. Uh, really appreciate Duncan you coming on and Aja best of luck with the fundraising. >>We'll keep you posted. Thanks, David. All right. Great. >>Okay. Now let's take a look at a short video. That's going to help you understand how to reduce the steps around your data ops. Let's watch.

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube presenting >>active de que intelligent automation for data quality brought to you by Iota Ho >>Welcome to the sixth episode of the I. O. Tahoe data automation series. On the cube. We're gonna start off with a segment on how to accelerate the adoption of snowflake with Glenn Grossman, who is the enterprise account executive from Snowflake and yusef khan, the head of data services from Iota. Gentlemen welcome. >>Good afternoon. Good morning, Good evening. Dave. >>Good to see you. Dave. Good to see you. >>Okay glenn uh let's start with you. I mean the Cube hosted the snowflake data cloud summit in November and we heard from customers and going from love the tagline zero to snowflake, you know, 90 minutes very quickly. And of course you want to make it simple and attractive for enterprises to move data and analytics into the snowflake platform but help us understand once the data is there, how is snowflake helping to achieve savings compared to the data lake? >>Absolutely. dave. It's a great question, you know, it starts off first with the notion and uh kind of, we coined it in the industry or t shirt size pricing. You know, you don't necessarily always need the performance of a high end sports car when you're just trying to go get some groceries and drive down the street 20 mph. The t shirt pricing really aligns to, depending on what your operational workload is to support the business and the value that you need from that business? Not every day. Do you need data? Every second of the moment? Might be once a day, once a week through that t shirt size price and we can align for the performance according to the environmental needs of the business. What those drivers are the key performance indicators to drive that insight to make better decisions, It allows us to control that cost. So to my point, not always do you need the performance of a Ferrari? Maybe you need the performance and gas mileage of the Honda Civic if you would just get and deliver the value of the business but knowing that you have that entire performance landscape at a moments notice and that's really what what allows us to hold and get away from. How much is it going to cost me in a data lake type of environment? >>Got it. Thank you for that yussef. Where does Io Tahoe fit into this equation? I mean what's, what's, what's unique about the approach that you're taking towards this notion of mobilizing data on snowflake? >>Well, Dave in the first instance we profile the data itself at the data level, so not just at the level of metadata and we do that wherever that data lives. So it could be structured data could be semi structured data could be unstructured data and that data could be on premise. It could be in the cloud or it could be on some kind of SAAS platform. And so we profile this data at the source system that is feeding snowflake within snowflake itself within the end applications and the reports that the snowflake environment is serving. So what we've done here is take our machine learning discovery technology and make snowflake itself the repository for knowledge and insights on data. And this is pretty unique. Uh automation in the form of our P. A. Is being applied to the data both before after and within snowflake. And so the ultimate outcome is that business users can have a much greater degree of confidence that the data they're using can be trusted. Um The other thing we do uh which is unique is employee data R. P. A. To proactively detect and recommend fixes the data quality so that removes the manual time and effort and cost it takes to fix those data quality issues. Uh If they're left unchecked and untouched >>so that's key to things their trust, nobody's gonna use the data. It's not trusted. But also context. If you think about it, we've contextualized are operational systems but not our analytic system. So there's a big step forward glen. I wonder if you can tell us how customers are managing data quality when they migrate to snowflake because there's a lot of baggage in in traditional data warehouses and data lakes and and data hubs. Maybe you can talk about why this is a challenge for customers. And like for instance can you proactively address some of those challenges that customers face >>that we certainly can. They have. You know, data quality. Legacy data sources are always inherent with D. Q. Issues whether it's been master data management and data stewardship programs over the last really almost two decades right now, you do have systemic data issues. You have siloed data, you have information operational, data stores data marks. It became a hodgepodge when organizations are starting their journey to migrate to the cloud. One of the things that were first doing is that inspection of data um you know first and foremost even looking to retire legacy data sources that aren't even used across the enterprise but because they were part of the systemic long running operational on premise technology, it stayed there when we start to look at data pipelines as we onboard a customer. You know we want to do that era. We want to do QA and quality assurance so that we can, And our ultimate goal eliminate the garbage in garbage out scenarios that we've been plagued with really over the last 40, 50 years of just data in general. So we have to take an inspection where traditionally it was E. T. L. Now in the world of snowflake, it's really lt we're extracting were loading or inspecting them. We're transforming out to the business so that these routines could be done once and again give great business value back to making decisions around the data instead of spending all this long time. Always re architect ng the data pipeline to serve the business. >>Got it. Thank you. Glenda yourself of course. Snowflakes renowned for customers. Tell me all the time. It's so easy. It's so easy to spin up a data warehouse. It helps with my security. Again it simplifies everything but so you know, getting started is one thing but then adoption is also a key. So I'm interested in the role that that I owe. Tahoe plays in accelerating adoption for new customers. >>Absolutely. David. I mean as Ben said, you know every every migration to Snowflake is going to have a business case. Um uh and that is going to be uh partly about reducing spending legacy I. T. Servers, storage licenses, support all those good things um that see I want to be able to turn off entirely ultimately. And what Ayatollah does is help discover all the legacy undocumented silos that have been built up, as Glenn says on the data estate across a period of time, build intelligence around those silos and help reduce those legacy costs sooner by accelerating that that whole process. Because obviously the quicker that I. T. Um and Cdos can turn off legacy data sources the more funding and resources going to be available to them to manage the new uh Snowflake based data estate on the cloud. And so turning off the old building, the new go hand in hand to make sure those those numbers stack up the program is delivered uh and the benefits are delivered. And so what we're doing here with a Tahoe is improving the customers are y by accelerating their ability to adopt Snowflake. >>Great. And I mean we're talking a lot about data quality here but in a lot of ways that's table stakes like I said, if you don't trust the data, nobody's going to use it. And glenn, I mean I look at Snowflake and I see obviously the ease of use the simplicity you guys are nailing that the data sharing capabilities I think are really exciting because you know everybody talks about sharing data but then we talked about data as an asset, Everyone so high I to hold it. And so sharing is is something that I see as a paradigm shift and you guys are enabling that. So one of the things beyond data quality that are notable that customers are excited about that, maybe you're excited about >>David, I think you just cleared it out. It's it's this massive data sharing play part of the data cloud platform. Uh you know, just as of last year we had a little over about 100 people, 100 vendors in our data marketplace. That number today is well over 450 it is all about democratizing and sharing data in a world that is no longer held back by FTp s and C. S. V. S and then the organization having to take that data and ingested into their systems. You're a snowflake customer. want to subscribe to an S and P data sources an example, go subscribe it to it. It's in your account there was no data engineering, there was no physical lift of data and that becomes the most important thing when we talk about getting broader insights, data quality. Well, the data has already been inspected from your vendor is just available in your account. It's obviously a very simplistic thing to describe behind the scenes is what our founders have created to make it very, very easy for us to democratize not only internal with private sharing of data, but this notion of marketplace ensuring across your customers um marketplace is certainly on the type of all of my customers minds and probably some other areas that might have heard out of a recent cloud summit is the introduction of snow park and being able to do where all this data is going towards us. Am I in an ale, you know, along with our partners at Io Tahoe and R. P. A. Automation is what do we do with all this data? How do we put the algorithms and targets now? We'll be able to run in the future R and python scripts and java libraries directly inside Snowflake, which allows you to even accelerate even faster, Which people found traditionally when we started off eight years ago just as a data warehousing platform. >>Yeah, I think we're on the cusp of just a new way of thinking about data. I mean obviously simplicity is a starting point but but data by its very nature is decentralized. You talk about democratizing data. I like this idea of the global mesh. I mean it's very powerful concept and again it's early days but you know, keep part of this is is automation and trust, yussef you've worked with Snowflake and you're bringing active D. Q. To the market what our customers telling you so far? >>Well David the feedback so far has been great. Which is brilliant. So I mean firstly there's a point about speed and acceleration. Um So that's the speed to incite really. So where you have inherent data quality issues uh whether that's with data that was on premise and being brought into snowflake or on snowflake itself, we're able to show the customer results and help them understand their data quality better Within Day one which is which is a fantastic acceleration. I'm related to that. There's the cost and effort to get that insight is it's a massive productivity gain versus where you're seeing customers who've been struggling sometimes too remediate legacy data and legacy decisions that they've made over the past couple of decades, so that that cost and effort is much lower than it would otherwise have been. Um 3rdly, there's confidence and trust, so you can see Cdos and see IOS got demonstrable results that they've been able to improve data quality across a whole bunch of use cases for business users in marketing and customer services, for commercial teams, for financial teams. So there's that very quick kind of growth in confidence and credibility as the projects get moving. And then finally, I mean really all the use cases for the snowflake depend on data quality, really whether it's data science, uh and and the kind of snow park applications that Glenn has talked about, all those use cases work better when we're able to accelerate the ri for our joint customers by very quickly pushing out these data quality um insights. Um And I think one of the one of the things that the snowflake have recognized is that in order for C. I. O. Is to really adopt enterprise wide, um It's also as well as the great technology with Snowflake offers, it's about cleaning up that legacy data state, freeing up the budget for CIA to spend it on the new modern day to a state that lets them mobilise their data with snowflake. >>So you're seeing the Senate progression. We're simplifying the the the analytics from a tech perspective. You bring in Federated governance which which brings more trust. Then then you bring in the automation of the data quality piece which is fundamental. And now you can really start to, as you guys are saying, democratized and scale uh and share data. Very powerful guys. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. I appreciate as well. Yeah.

>>The data Lake concept was intriguing when first introduced in 2010, but people quickly realized that shoving data into a data Lake may data Lake stagnant, repositories that were essentially storage bins that were less expensive than traditional data warehouses. This is Dave Vellante joined me for IO. Tahoe's latest installment of the data automation series, active DQ, intelligent automation for data quality management. We'll talk to experts from snowflake about their data assessment utility from within the snowflake platform and how it scales to the demands of business. While also controlling costs. I have Tahoe CEO, AIG Hora will explain how IO Tahoe and snowflake together are bringing active DQ to market. And what the customers are saying about it. Save the date Thursday, April 29th for IO Tahoes data automation series active DQ, intelligent automation for data quality show streams promptly at 11:00 AM Eastern on the cube, the >>In high tech coverage.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeff Freak here with the Cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios with ongoing coverage of Cisco Definite create. We've been going to definite create, I think, since the very beginning. This year, of course. Like everything else, it's it's virtual. So we're excited to cover it virtually and digitally like we have a lot of other shows here in 2020 and we're excited to have our next guest. We've got Kun Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering. Francisco, Good to see you. Coun. Thank >>you for having me. >>And joining him is Eric Nippy is the VP of system systems Engineering. Francisco. Good to see Eric. >>Good to be here. Thank you. >>Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now, in this new great world of program ability and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute. Because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was kun. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think the theme was a human centered, human centered network, and you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come. But but I would love to get kind of historical perspective because we've been talking a lot. And I know Eric Son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them. But they're really important to everything, and the only time you hear about him was when the flag is thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective load and the numbers and the evolution of the network as we've moved to this modern time and you know thank goodness, because if Cove it hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition, so I just I just love to get some historical perspective because you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah, we absolutely have. I think you know what you're referring to was back in the day the human network campaign and to your point that the load, the number of hosts, the traffic just overall, the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over the last decade and a half, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers on how you know the role of I t. Has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic. You know, the fact that it's now as a service and elastic eyes is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, on an ongoing basis a great customer experience. And so it's been It's been a very interesting right, indeed. Yeah, >>And then and then just to close the loop, the one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia. You're the question is, are you developer an engineer? So And your whole advice to all these network engineers is just Just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate is a complete is completely 15 years over to the, you know, really software to find side. >>Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of C I C D pipeline to network infrastructure. Look at network really as code and get all of the benefits from that in the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve in that is just, you know, quite quite significant in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, you know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, you know, don't don't be shy. It's It's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. You know, we like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely software Centris City and the, um, program ability. >>Right? So, Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there, too, that I was able to dig up Going back to 2000 and 2 752 page book in the very back corner of a dark, dirty, dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco Network Security 752 pages. Wow. How has security changed? From a time where before I could just read a book, a big book, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected, everything is a p. I driven. Everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workload spread out all over the place. And, Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, No eso Wow. Kudos that you you found that book. I'm really impressed there, so thank you. Little street credit. So I want to get on something that you you talked about because I think it's very important to to this overall conversation if we think about the scale of the network and coun hit on it briefly. You talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the you know it's estimated By the end of this year, there's gonna be about 27 billion devices on the global Internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory, we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global Internet on a on a daily basis in the primarily that that that is I o T devices. That's digitally connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be connect, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global Internet is within a company's infrastructure. Accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor, so we really need Thio and I think the right expression for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about perimeters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002. I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion, prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security. Really? In the in the guise of under the under the under the realm of really two aspects the identity. Who is accessing the data in the context, What data is being access and that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and technologies like machine learning, an automated intelligence. They're going to be our artificial intelligence. Rather are gonna be table stakes because the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable under current. You know, just current security practices mean the network is gonna have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally, shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, one thing That cove it has done a bunk many things is kind of re taught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We had Dave Rennes in on it Google Cloud a couple years ago, and I remember him talking about early days of Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you describe kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it, right? So really kind of rethinking automation and re thinking about the way that you manage these things and and the level right, the old Is it a pet or is it or is it, um, part of the herd? And I think it's interesting what you talked about coun really human powered Internet and being driven by a lot of this video. But to what you just said, Erik, the next big wave right is I, O. T and five G. And I think you know, you talk about 3.7 of devices per person. That's nothing compared toa right, all these sensors and all these devices and all these factories because five G is really targeted to machine to machines, which there's ah lot of them, and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to Yukun thinking about this next great wave in a five G i o t kind of driven world where it's kind of like one voice kind of fell off compared to I p traffic on the network, I think you're going to see the same thing. Kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also gonna fall off dramatically. Is the machine generated data just skyrockets through the roof? >>Yeah. No, absolutely. And I think thio also what Eric touched on the visibility on that and they'll be able to process that data at the edge that's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further. And it's gonna, you know, make the role of the network the connectivity of it all, and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of program ability. Within that, we're see the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an I. O. T. Speed space. We see that we have hosts there that are not necessarily, you know, behaving like other hosts would on a network, for example, manufacturing floor production, robot or security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing you know, partners and customers employing program ability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at. But then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that it can provide, bringing on board those those hosts in a very transparent way on then, you know, keep keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going right, >>right. So, Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the A. D and the machines along along for middle minute. But I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way toe to motivate people to build this new skill set in terms of getting software certifications within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you clearly got people motivated because there's posts all over the place and they've all got their their nice big badge of their certification. But, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus and engineering a technician. And it's a, you know, kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce as well as the partners, etcetera and really adopting kind of almost a software first in this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently, a lot of people like to beat me. So I mean, that in of itself was was a was a great success. But, you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? I mean, obviously, he looked back to the very early days of our vision, right? It was. It was to change the way the world, you know, worked, played, live and learn. And if you think about and you hit on this when we were you know, your discussion with with With Kun in the early days of Cove it. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that that our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several last three decades really help the world continue Thio to to do business for students to continue to go thio school or, you know, clinicians to connect with patients. If I think about that mission to meet program ability is just the next generation of that mission, uh, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing to enable customers, employees, partners to, uh, essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity. Now the leverage it for critical insight again, If we look at some of the some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing, the network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from the but it isn't necessarily and out of the box type of integration. So I look at program ability and and what we're doing with debt net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now. It's a way to extrapolate its away thio full critical data so that I can make a decision and I if that decisions automated or if that decision requires some type of a manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting, or in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most. The definite pounds we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skills that's going to be. It's not enough. Like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we dropped were created to beat the boss challenge, it was really simple. Hey, guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out, and I'm gonna achieve the certification myself because I want to continue to be very relevant. I'm gonna continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for it. Anybody can get there before me. Maybe there's a little incentive tied to and the incentive, although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of ah, a lot of our team who achieved it Incentive with secondary. They just wanted have bragging rights like, Yeah, I beat Eric, Right, Right. >>Absolutely. No, that Z you know, put your money where your mouth is, right? If it's important than what you know, you should do it too. And you know, the whole not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well. But I wanna extend kind of the conversation on the Koven impact. Right? Because I'm sure you've seen all the social media means you know who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO of the CMO or cove it. And we all know the answer to the question. But you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure, world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud, and people are trying to move stuff all the way around. Now suddenly had this co vid moment right in March, which is really a light switch moment. People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home and it's not only you but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So but now we're six months plus into this thing, and I would just love to get your perspective, you know, and kind of the change from Oh, my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can can get get what they need when they need it from where they are? But but then really moving from this is an emergency situation. Stopgap situation toe. This is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know this is going to drive. Ah, riel change in the way that people communicate in the way that people where they sit and do their job and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need thio to plan for. >>So I think I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized any any interaction that could be driven virtually waas. And what's interesting is we, as you said. We went from that light switch moment where, and I believe the status this and I'll probably get the number wrong. But like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70% in interesting that it worked. You know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on How do I enable VPN scale of mass? How doe I, you know, leverage. You know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings in virtual connectivity much faster now that as you said that we've kind of gotten out of the fog of war or frog fog of battle organizations, we're looking at what they accomplished. And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition. Thio Oh my gosh, we need to change, too. We have an opportunity to change and we're looking. We see a lot of organizations specifically around financial services, health care through the K through 20 educational environment, all looking at how can they doom or virtually for a couple of reasons? Obviously, there is a significant safety factor, and again, we're still in that we're still in the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students patients remain safe. But second, we've found in discussions with a lot of senior I T executives and our customers that people are happier working from home. People are more productive working from home. And that again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. And then, third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining again leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like, uh, unified collaboration that's very personalized to the end users experience, they're going to do that and again they're going to save money. They're gonna have happier employees, and ultimately they're gonna make their their employees in their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent. And some estimates put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to stay today in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>Interesting. And I would say I'd say 15% is low, especially if you if you qualify it with, you know, part time, right? There was a great interview were doing and, you know, talk about working from home. He used to work from home as the exception, right? Because the cable person was coming or you get a new washing machine or something, where now that's probably get, you know, in many cases will shift to the other where I'm generally gonna work from home unless you know somebody's in town or have an important meeting or there's some special collaboration. Uh, that drives me to be in. But, you know, I wanna go back to Yukun and and really doubled down on. You know, I think most people spend too much time focusing, especially. We'll just say within the virtual events base where we play on the things you can't do virtually. We can't meet in the hall. We can't grab a quick coffee to drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here. You're in Belgium, right? Eric is in Ohio, were in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to travel and and check into a hotel and and all that stuff to get together for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that that it doesn't replace, and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives because those are coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives airway way more out spoken. I you know, I look at myself I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are, in a way, wanting to go back to the office part time, as Eric also explained. But a lot of it you could do virtually. We have virtual coffees with team or, you know, even here in Belgium are are local. General manager has, ah, virtual aperitif. Every Friday obviously skipped the one this week. But you know, there's there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that the network enables, Um, you know, to to get the basketball world right, >>So I just we're gonna wrap the segment. I wanna give you guys both the last word. You both Francisco for a while and you know, Susie, we and the team on Definite has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of 456 years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but you know, it's really really grown. And, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple of thoughts is, you know, with a little bit of perspective. And you know what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road. Since you guys have been there for a while, you've been in the space. Uh, let's start with Yukun. >>Okay? I think the possibility it creates, I think, really program ability, software defined is really about the art of the possible. It's what you can dream up and then go code Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes that relevance. And a customer base is, um, you know, and then it is the evolution off the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to it. We're seeing really people dive into that in customers, um, co creating with us on. I think that's where we're going in terms of like the evolution off the value proposition there in terms of what technology can provide, but also how it impacts people as we discussed and and redefines process. >>I love that the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in, uh, hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. >>America, I >>love to get your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career in Cisco turning, putting I P phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 1 4002 when three idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a of just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a We're looking at an inflection point in this industry, and it's really it's not about programming is not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation. But again, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past what you know, just connectivity. The network touches everything and is more workload. Moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. The network is the really the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place, uh, in the in the i t. Lexicon as being that critical for that critical insight provider for for how users are interacting with the network. How users air interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with one another. Program ability is a way to do that more efficiently with greater, greater degree of certainty, with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of I t services and digitization. So to me, I think we're gonna look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, Man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? I think I think really, this is This is the future, and I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. >>Well, coun Eric. Thank you for sharing your perspective. You know, it's it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference on. It's also nice to be living in a new age where you can you can, you know, stay at the same company and and still refresh. You know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing because a zoo said I remember those i p first i p phone days and I thought, Well, Ma Bell must be happy because the old Mother's Day problem is finally solved when we don't have to have a >>dedicated connection >>between every mother and every child in the middle of May. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, really enjoyed the conversation. >>Thank you. >>Yeah. All >>right. He's kun. He was Eric. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube for continuing coverage of Cisco Definite Connect. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco and welcome back to the cubes coverage. Just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual. We're not face to face the cubes been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro, his beast vice president of product, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom. You are the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multi-cloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area it's converged in multiple theaters and technology super important. So I want to get into that with you. But first thousand eyes was recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important, the new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco is going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talking programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco. Tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, surely been an exciting six months, 4,000 eyes on the entire team and our customers as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to enable your employees to be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the COVID dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, the home of the conference and book talk track we'll get to in a second, but it exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandoned from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home VPNs or passe. Maybe it's SD when maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running off for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed this at scale. What's your view on this? And what does thousand nights thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was a early, simple, uh, connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. And you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone. We'll totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing barrel independence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say key functions of that application. >>Those three things together ultimately are creating that level of complex service chain. It really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience and ultimately the it organization it's really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And yet then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it and be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, as you're getting to some of these high-scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation self-healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices earlier, you mentioned data out of the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're going to look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on cube before. How does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things what's important to look at? Can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. Your first off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talked about right aside, you know, data, um, alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen, and you have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data to become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly. They'll allow you to be able to see the unseen, allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the form of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back to the network fabric, whether that is a dressing you're modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen within our customers using thousand eyes data, be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then use that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as our employees, >>Classic policy based activities take into a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it people like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or arcane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I got to ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you know, we saw it within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams were really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have naturally thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their CTP and infrastructure across, uh, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes endpoint point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device in the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you got the cloud. How is your technology help the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, a great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence to action and where in the past you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the Nike organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes and how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language and allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, within thousand eyes in terms of a need, enabling that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our Sherlyn capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, what, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization. But it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. They're having worked collaboratively with the different ESPs that they're pairing with, with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I've got to ask you the question we think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it. Teams. Um, you see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them. It's got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because it does a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a, a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler. The new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. Talk about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a worm situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve the issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you the ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your bounds, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that, as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type event analogy, you'll be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to, uh, be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light as people using say, thousand eyes, as part of saying se land base for allow where you're looking to say benchmark and gain confidence as you look to scale out and either, you know, benchmarking different ESPs within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that competence, to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights. The classic financial model ROI got baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. I mean, who doesn't, who doesn't love automation, automation's awesome, right? Automate things. But as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products, it means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you look at automation and everything as a, and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the value that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only process and gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you'd say, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need the level of automation. You'd be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And, you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally difficult to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking, salt >>Feature it's under the hood, the feature of everything, because the service is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness and the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>And ultimately, I think, you know, when you look at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a product perspective, we, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure it's running upon, but the network it's connected to. And then ultimately the user in the sense of that user and by leveraging a thousand eyes, being able to then integrate thousand 18 to how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the developers looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of how your users will access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. And we've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on sharing. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Do you have a car, a vice president of product here with thousand eyes. Now, part of Cisco I'm John farrier, host of the cube cube virtual for dev net. Create virtual. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the que were in Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of Cisco definite create. We've been covering definite create for a number of years, I think since the very first show. And Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and getting Debs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and developing solutions and using brain power that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have our next guest. Ah, partner for someone is Brad Haas. He is the engineering director for Dev Ops at Presidio. Brad, great to see you. >>Hey, Jeff. Great to be here. >>Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect, Francisco Definite partners. And he has been driving ah, whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here. Looking forward to this conversation. >>Absolutely. So let's let's >>start >>with you, Chuck. Because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, you know, software defined networking has been talked about for a long time, and, you know, it's really seems to be maturing. And software to find everything right has been taking over, especially with with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability, custom ability in software and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is toe have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, Absolutely. So along this whole journey of definite, where we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of versus co platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners, and what we hear from our customers and our partners is they wanna our customers one away to be able to identify. Does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey. I'm trying to do do a new implementation. I wanna automate that. How can I find a partner? Thio, Get there. And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this definite journey with us for the last six years. They really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and given edge to my customers to show them that, Yes, I have these capabilities. I built a business practice. I have technology. I have technologists that really understand this capability, and they have the definite certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what are definite partner. Specialization is all about >>right, that's great. And, Brad, you're certainly one of those partners. And I want to get your perspective because partners are often times a little bit closer to the customer because you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on. We know what happened back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home on You can't goto work, so you know there's all the memes and social media about who you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation. The CEO of the CMO or cove it. And we all know what the answer is. Whatever you can share some information. So what happened then? And really, for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it. Six months plus and and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How is the customer? Attitudes kind of change now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment. And really, we need to put in place, um foundation to carry forward for a very long time. Potentially. >>Yeah, it was really quite interesting, actually. You know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests. Thio help with automation of provisioning our customers. And in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there, and I'd say it became or of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers. Thio. You know, new topology is where instead of the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly and waited. Have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and program ability building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers. Thio get up and running really fast on. But that is what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit, you know, Now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my office is in a different way, You know, for example, you know how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my e? My conference rooms are there, Uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information like, how many people are in the building at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that? You know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So? So the conversations really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before march. >>Now, I wonder with you, Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view. I mean, the network is amazing. It had had co vid struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly. Entertainment, Um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality. But for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if you know, kind of from your perspective, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, definite with with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space is good spaces. You could be giving this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation. And as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself. I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years this is you know, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore. But my day to day functions are are still the same, and it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry as faras kind of moving to that application type of economy as we go to micro services as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud. Those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this to this covitz situation, and I think it's helped to to justify the investments that that our customers have made. A swell is what our partners have been being able to do to deliver on that multi cloud capability to take those applications, get him closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable. Thio users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls, >>right, right, it's interesting. And Brad, you made a comment on another interview I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of applications. Now, being first class citizens was was what you said, and it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now? Really, it's the infrastructure, that response back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that APS first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that gives them the ability to react in the marketplace to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's a It's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push the cloud was really interesting In the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to you change our applications to be cloud first, you know, And then I think the terminology changed over time. I've, um, team or cloud native. So when we when we look at what Cloud has done over the past five years, with customers moving, you know, there their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center. But what it's really become is a place thio host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're no longer talking about you know, the assets per se. We're talking about the applications and what what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially what with the whole move to cloud native and micro services in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure. As code you're now able toe, bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application as infrastructure is code, the application in this the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are all are wrapped together and you've got changed control, version control. Um, and it's all automated, you know, it's it's a beautiful thing, and I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking. I think everybody was trying to figure it out, and they didn't really fully understand what that meant. Now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like, as it's as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's terror, former answerable, whatever that might be. Whatever method or tool that you're using Thio to bring it all together. It Z you know, it's really interesting. You know, I think I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than you know, when those early days of S d. N, we're out, you know, it was a positive controller. Is it the new version of S and M. P? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible, >>right? Right. But still, Chuckas, you said, right? There's still a lot of AP ice, and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off. The network that all have to fit, uh, have to fit together. You know, we cover pager duty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the problems are within a very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandoned the shopping cart or whatever the particular applications. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability. Super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of. And they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. So the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference? I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the Internet, the amount of people necessary to to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale. It's automation that makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that. Automatic provisions provisioning. Now that we're in micro services, now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to to better to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we could very quickly spend something up to to take that load off where traditionally it was. Open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there. Let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution. Go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team. They just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability in a point that Brad Maeda's faras you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it, I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the A p, i s from the infrastructure and then the ability to tie that into other systems like an I p address management or a change control or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made in infrastructure changed and now I can automatically do that. Documentation up Dayton record. I know who did it. I know when they did it, and I know what they did. And I know what the test results were even five years ago. That was fantasy land. Now, today, that's just the new normal. That's just how we all operates. >>Right? Right, Right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud Multi Cloud, Public Cloud. You know, as I think you said, Brad, When Public Cloud first came out, there was kind of this this Russian to we're gonna throw everything in there than for for different reasons. People decided. Maybe that's not the best, the best solution. But really, it's horses for courses, right? And I think it's pretty interesting that that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're gonna put their workloads. And, oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right? It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my my initial Dev and an Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I wanna move it into my data center, and then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something. I wanna flex capability. So from from your perspective and helping customers work through this because still, there's a lot of opinions about what is multi cloud, what is hybrid cloud? And, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through? You know, everybody talks about their journey. I think they're still, you know, kind of bumbling down, bumbling down past, trying to find new things. What works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. >>Yeah, no doubt is still early days. And you know, I e go back Thio being applications centric because, you know, being able thio understand that application. When you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like. When you when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service, while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service, and some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier. Those resource is wherever they are and be defined in that infrastructure is code and automation. But you know, decide from provisioning. I think we focus a lot about provisioning when we talk about automation. We also have these amazing capabilities on on the side of operations to like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability Thio gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before or at least in the, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name. Like, maybe it was something from the Hobbit. Right now you've got things coming up in spinning, spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place in that thing. You used to know what that waas Now you have toe quickly. Figure out where it went, so the observe ability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody, um, should be paying attention, attention to moving forward with. Regards, Thio when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers Or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that in a micro services you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, program ability in a p I s and, you know, yang models or tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many break things coming out of this, you know? And it's all like a data structure that that people who are going down this path and the definite path they're learning these data structures and be able to rationalize and make sense of them. Once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or a switch. Um, Amazon. You know, it doesn't matter. You're you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great, Chuck. I want to shift gears a little bit because there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about about, you know, definite really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as really more of a software software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you could put a little more color on that, Um, because clearly, as you said partners Air super important, it's your primary go to market and and Presidio's, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world. That's and you know, you said, there's some There's some, you know, nontraditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner, that suddenly you guys were playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yes, Jeff, that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with Devon, it's whether it be at one of the Cisco Live events in the Definite zone or the prior definite create events will have. We'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resale market. This what we're doing with the definite specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem share them with are extremely large, definite community so they can get access to those to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there. But they may come into into a scenario where it's working with their vertical or working with the technology piece that they may not have an automation practice for. We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint goto markets where so they could go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value. On top of that traditional stack that brings us to this business, outcomes of the customers are looking for a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. >>That's terrific. Well, again, it zits unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the Cisco definite shows you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computers Museum, I think, the last couple of years. And in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together. Hope maybe, maybe for next year's event. But thank you very much for for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. >>You have a happy to be here. All >>right, Thanks a lot. That's Brad and Chuck. I'm Jeff. You're watching Cisco. Definite live coverage on the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. Hey, welcome back. And Buddy Jeffrey here with the Cube coming from our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of the Cisco Definite event is called Accelerating Automation with definite in the new normal. And we certainly know the new normal is not going away. We've been doing this since the middle of March. We're all the way to October. And so we're excited of our next guest. He's Thomas Shy V. He's the vice president of product marketing and data center networking for the intent based networking group at Cisco. Thomas, great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you, too. Yeah. Yeah. And truly running in normal, as everybody can see in our background. >>Exactly. Exactly so. But I mean, I'm curious. We've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light switch moment, which was, you know, no time to prep. And suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you got the kids home. You got the spouse home. Everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls in their classes. I'm curious from your perspective. You guys air right there on the on the network. You're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see? Kind of from your customers When suddenly, you know, March 16th hit and everybody had to go home. >>Well, good point. A. I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before on. Then the only other differences I'm really more on. Ravix calls and zoom called, but you know otherwise? Yes. Um what? What I do see, actually, is that, as I said, network becomes much more operates as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency. Quite frankly, uh, what do I need to have in place with respect to network? To get my things from left to right and, you know, just 2000 east or west, as we say in the data center Right on. That just is for most of my customers, very, very important topic at this point, right? >>You know, it's it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago. You know, the ability for so many people in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly. Eyes is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some some excitement in some kudos in terms of, you know, it is all based on the network, and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues that put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with with with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that were used to getting at the office or used to getting at school. >>Yeah, and I mean to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. We're clearly talking about some of these thes trends in the way I look at this. Trans is being distributed data centers and having the ability to move your workloads and your access for users to wherever you wanna be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so in a sense, we practice or knowing what we're prepping for. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important. And, you know, one of things. I actually do a little clock, a little little prep you for block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you if you didn't, if you didn't put this in place, you better put in place because I think, as we all know, we saw her march. This is like, maybe two or three months. We're now in October. Uh, and I think this is the new normal for some time being. Yeah, >>I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of trends, right? The other great trend is public cloud, um, and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. There's all types of variants on that theme. Yeah, you had in that block post about resiliency and data center cloud networking data center cloud. You know, some people think Wait, it's it's kind of an either or either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I got Public Cloud. And then, as I said, Hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both in inner Data Center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of the market is changing. How you guys air reacting and really putting the things in place t to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, I know. It's actually to me. It's really not counterintuitive, because in the end, what what I'm focusing on and the company's focus on is what our customers want to do and need to do on. That's really, um, would you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi cloud, Uh, in in the end, what? What? This is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want him to be, and they have different reasons why you want to place them right. You might have placed them for security reason. You might have placed for clients. Reason depending on which customer segment you're after. If you're in the United States or in Europe, in Asia there are a lot of different reasons we're gonna put your things. And so I think in the end, what on enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility and resiliency. And and so really, what you want to put in place is what we call like a cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed. But the larger context action which we see in the last couple of months accelerating, is really this whole seem around digital transformation, which goes hand in hand. Then, was the requirement on the Teesside really do? And I t operations transformation, Right? How I t operates on. I think that's really exciting to see. And this is actually where a lot off my discussions I was customers. What does it actually mean with respect to the I t organization? And what are the operational changes? There's a lot of our customers they're going through, quite frankly, accelerated going through >>right and and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is you know is an increasingly important thing. You know, as the as we know and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either the on the security or the way the networks moving or, as you said, shifting workloads around based on dynamic situations. Whether that's business security, etcetera, you too suffer to find networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in and adding mawr automation, You know, to more and more processes to free up those those, um, kind of limited resource is in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focused on and not stuff that that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of >>automation. Yeah, that's a good point. And they said the Tekla and a half, you know, sometimes in my mind is really going from cloud ready, which I think most of infrastructures today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on. This right is like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last 5 to 6 years. All the infrastructure that our customers have network infrastructure or the Nexus 9000. They're all cloud ready right now, what this really means. You have a P ice everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these a p i a neighborhood. And that's just the foundation for automation, right? You have to have that now. The next step really is What do you do with that capability? And right? And this is the integration was a lot off automation tools on. That's the whole range, right? This is where the I t operation transformation kicks in. Different customers a different speed, right? Some just You know, I used these AP ice and use normal tools that they have in the network world just to pull information. Some customers go for further and saying, I want to integrate this with extensive Deb equals some go even further and saying this is like the cloud native people saying, Oh, I want to use, let's say, redhead answerable. I want to use how she called terra form and use those things to actually drive. How I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus, the integration was relevant cloud native, enabling tools that really is happening. At this point, we're seeing customers accelerating that. That motion, which really then drives, is how they run their I t operations. And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see given. As I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There is no need for customers to actually do change something most of them have already. The infrastructures that can do this is just no doing the operation change the process, changes to actually get there >>right. And it's funny we we recently covered, you know, pager duty. And they highlight which you just talked about. The cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now were so interdependent on all these different a p. I s, you know, pulling data from all these applications. So a when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know there's a whole lot of potential throats to choke out there and find. Find those issues and it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even Mawr. Critically important not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver. You know, ultimately a customer experience within very small units of time s so that you don't lose that customer. You complete that transaction, they check out of the shopping cart. You know, all these these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And this, this is like I just said, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot off abilities for our customers how they want to actually structure the operation, right? One of the nice things around this whole automation, plus, uh, true integration closer to integration is you actually open this up. Now, this whole automation trained not just to the network operations person, right? You also open it up and can use this for the sake cups person or for the death of a person or for the cloud tops engineering team. Right? Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, it's literally it's an A p I interface, and you can now decide what is your process? Do you wanna have? On what? Traditional process. You have a request number. Corporation teams executes request using these tools and enhance it back over. Or you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I'm gonna hand over the second team and it can directly call these days a p I s right or even one step further. You can have the opportunity that the death of So the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template and I just execute right and it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range off different user roles in our customer base. What they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting, right, because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they wanna. We built the I T operations processes. >>That's interesting, you know, because the you know, the Dev ops culture has taken over a lot. Right obviously changed software programming for the last 20 years, and and I think you know there's a There's a lot of just kind of the concept of Dev ops versus necessarily. You know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, netapp. You know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world toe have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic kind of point of view versus a You know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can You can share how, you know, kind of that, Dev ops, um attitude, point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is has impacted, you know, things that Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally. Absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? Is none of this. None of this is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit. Maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of this just customer driven feedback. Uh, yeah, we we do have even network operations teams comes to saying, Hey, we use answerable heavily on the computer side. We might use this for for seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations with the variety of state. Whether these are the switches, whether it's our A, C and D C and controller or our Martha said orchestration capabilities, all of these has answerable integration away. All right, The other one is you mentioned how she from Cherepkov telephone. We have integrations available and they see the request for these tools to use that on DSO. That is emotion. We're in for over a year now. And another block, actually, that's out there. We're just supposed to saying you all set what you can do on then in parallel to this, right? Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on on definite and enablement and training on, you know, a little pluck. And I know probably part of the segment. The whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty off this is right. If you look at this, whether your naps person or a deaf person or seconds person, it doesn't really matter. There is a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level, right? And there's simple things like sandbox environments where you can, you know, without stress, dry things out. Snippets of code A there you could do all of these things. And so we do see, it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and the tremendous, uh uh, time people spend to learn, quite frankly. And that's another side product off. You know, the situation wherein people sit home and say, Okay, online learning is the thing. So thes, thes thes tools. They're used very heavily, right? >>So that's awesome. Because, you know, we've We've had Suzy we on a number of times. And I know he and Mandy and the team, right, really built this definite thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right? Democratization to the access tool, taking it out of of just a mahogany row with again really limited number of people that know how to make it work and and could make changes in opening up to a software defined world where now that you know It's his application centric point of view where the people that are building the APS to go create competitive advantage now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help him out of these environments. Really interesting. I wonder, you know, when you look at what's happened with Public Cloud and how they kind of changed the buying parameter, how they kind of changed the the the degree of difficulty to get projects started. You know how you guys have kind of integrated that that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done? >>Yeah, I mean again, it's It's I took a look at this more from a from a customer. Answer, right? It's the transformation process, and it always starts is I want agility. I want flexibility. Anyone resiliency, right. This is where we talked to a business owner what they're looking for and then it translates into into a night operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map them. How you actually do this on that? Just tries. Then what truths do you want to have available to actually enable this right and the enablement again? is for different roles right there is. You need to give sing services to the app developer and, uh, the platform team and the security team right to your point so the network can act at the same speed. But you also give to to the network operations teams because they need thio adjust. And they have the ability to react thio to some of these requirements. Right? And it's not just automation. I think we we focused on that. But there's also to your point, the need how to extend between data sent us, you know, just just for backup and recovery. And how do I extend into public clouds? Right. Uh, in the end, that's ah, that's the network connectivity problem. And we have soft us. We have made us available. We have integrations into, uh, W s. We have integrations into azure to actually make this very easy from a from a network perspective to extend your private domains private networks into virtual private networks on on these public cloud. So from an app developer perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here, someone might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the end. I think what what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say I need to have something separate for this deployment was separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. E need to do this resilient in the resilient way in an enjoyable way. Give me the tools. And so that's really where we focus, Um, and what we're driving right? It's that combination of automation consistently and then definite tools available that we support. But they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools. The ones I mentioned right that everybody is using. So you're not getting into this. Oh, this is specific to Cisco. Uh, it's really democratization. I actually like the term. Yeah, >>it's It's a great terminate, and it's it's really interesting, especially with with the A p i s and the way everything is so tight together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customers demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and workloads, and one of those things are moving, but they don't really wanna manage that. They just wanna, you know, deliver business, benefit to their customers and respond. Thio, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, etcetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this at first point of view versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and and enable this hyper fast development, hyper fast change and in the competitive landscape, or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah. No, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's it's kind of interesting because we we started on the Cisco Data Center side we started. It's probably six or seven years ago, uh, when we when we named the applications centric. Clearly, a lot of these concepts evolved, but in a sense it is. That reversal of the role from the network provides something, and you used Teoh. This is what I want to do, and I need a service thinking on the networking side to explosives that can be consumed, and so that clearly is playing out and said Automation Issa Kiki Foundation that we put in place in our customers. Most of our customers this point on these on these products? Uh, they have all the capabilities there. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them points. >>Well, it's good times for you because I'm sure you've seen all the memes in in in social Media, right? What's driving your digital transformation? Is that the CEO, the CMO or cove it? And we all know the answer to the question, so I don't think the pace of change is going to slow down any time soon. So for keeping the network up and enabling us all the get done, what we have to get done and and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes >>Yeah, I know. Thanks. Thanks for having me. And again. Yeah, if you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started? Cisco Definite. It's the place to go. It's, you know, fantastic fantastic environment, and I highly recommend everybody roll up your sleeve and you know the best reasons you can have. >>Yeah, and we know once the physical events come back, we've been toe definite, create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, really engaged community. Sharing lots of information is kind of. That's still kind of that early vibe. You know where everyone is is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So, you know, like this using the team were really built a great thing. And we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back face to face. Okay, >>look forward to that as well. >>All right, Thanks. He's Thomason. Jeff, you're watching Continuing coverage of Cisco. Definite accelerating with automation and program ability. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>Around the globe presenting accelerating automation with Deb brought to you by Cisco >>We're back. This is Dave Vellante and TKK Anini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. >>How are you? >>Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we? >>No, that no one did, but yeah, it, uh, that was right before everything happened. >>Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in, in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things have exploded as the work from home pivot has occurred. Uh, and, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent what are you seeing out there? >>Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are, are along with our partner DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's, you know, North of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next, next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but what people essentially accept, expect that to, you know, at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So what does that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that, you know, in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>No, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable, is sort of the phrase that you used. And, and essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease their, the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator. But as, as work shifts from home, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to, you know, operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experience day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all the groceries we order, um, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that, um, we can go about our business, uh, effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business. Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation, you know, generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting a security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for, you know, education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if when you take the phrase, you know, uh, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight, right? >>Yeah. Well, there's, they're clever, uh, giving them that, um, you know, there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then they have, uh, a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavioral anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but it also you having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I see that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that, that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, our, our survey partner and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there, uh, in that, in that dataset. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I, I came to this trade show looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you can closer, you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what, what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no data center required, no distract required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about, Oh, what computers are gonna run on or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so, but, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right. There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what, you know, dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the, the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And, and frankly, that is, um, that is the, the love language of cloud. Um, it's, it's machines, it's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, uh, you know, it is the, the, uh, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? While we, we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threaten model, you, you, you say, you know, can my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company like companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick-tock, I don't care, but, but, but they, they sort of laid out. This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that and you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy. I mean, beyond GDPR and California, consumer privacy act, um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem, um, uh, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I saw it. Um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could, you know, play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your, your premise. >>When I, when I first started, um, playing online games, I'm going back to the text based adventure stuff, like muds and moves. I did a talk at, at MIT one time and, um, this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you shouldn't be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It is two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but, you know, ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or you, >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, I'm trying to try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, it, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is, is sort of the, the magic recipe is, is not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. I'm definitely >>Seeing, I wonder if you see it as just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems, and be becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what are you? >>Yeah, no, and it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than, you know, the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high performance businesses. >>You know, in fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how they're connect, connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters, isn't it? >>Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring a band and say, okay, all your guitar players go over here. All your bass Blair is over there. I'm like what happened to the band? So that's, that's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together, um, and servicing the same backlog and, and, and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. >>Well, I always, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his, his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's, it's awesome to have you as a guest. >>I love these, I love >>Things. Thanks for inviting me and I miss you. I, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Uh, like the sign says to get Kenny, thanks so much for coming to the queue. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We break back with our next guest, this short break.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Accelerating Automation with DevNet, brought to you by Cisco. (downbeat music) >> Hello, and I'm John Furrier of theCUBE, your host for Accelerating Automation with DevNet by Cisco. And we're here to close out the virtual event with Mandy Whaley, the senior director. Mandy, take it away. >> Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event and hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at DevNet Create, which is our free virtual event happening globally on October 13th. There's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual Demo Jam, which is kind of like an open mic for demos, where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be giving out and recognizing our DevNet Creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we've got really interesting channels. We have our Creators Channel, which is full of technical talks, lightning talks. This is where our community external to Cisco people come in, share what they've been working on, what they've been learning during the year. We also have a channel called APIs in Action, which is where you can go deep into, you know, IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos, talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called Straight from Engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers building those products as well. And we have a Start Now for those people just getting started who may need to dive into some basics around coding, APIs, and GET. That's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event, and we're going to a have a few fun things. We have some DevNet Advocate team members who are also musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel. Join us in whichever timezone you live in, because we'll be in three different timezones. And we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. Thanks so much. >> That's awesome, very innovative, multiple timezones. Accelerating Automation with DevNet. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you at DevNet create. Thanks for watching. (downbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the Cube. I'm John for a year host. We've got a great conversation virtual event, accelerating automation with definite Cisco. Definite. And of course, we got the Cisco Brain Trust here. Cube alumni Suzy we Vice President, senior Vice President GM and also CTO of Cisco. Definite and ecosystem Success C X, All that great stuff. Many Wadley Who's the director? Senior director of definite certifications. Eric Field, director of developer advocacy. Susie Mandy. Eric, Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you down. So >>we're not in >>person. We >>don't Can't be at the definite zone. We can't be on site doing definite created All the great stuff we've been doing in the past three years were virtual the cube Virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I gotta ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the succession had has been awesome. But definite create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the definite community. This is what this ties into the theme of accelerating automation with definite because you said to me, I think four years ago everything should be a service or X a s is it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision? Because this is really important. And still only 5 to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and program ability. What's your What's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that is, more and more businesses are coming online is I mean, they're all online, But is there growing into the cloud? Is their growing in new areas as we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on. But what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security. It has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure. How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be ableto really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable, the infrastructure is programmable, and you don't need just acts writing on top. But now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to a higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You remember a few years ago when definite create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we're talking about Muraki. You know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was Cisco um Europe in Barcelona before all the cove it hit and you had the massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on right when the pandemic hit. And even now, more than ever, the cloud scale the modern APS. The momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing Mawr innovation at scale. Because the pressure to do that because >>the stay alive get >>your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world? Because you were there in person. Now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are, Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers as businesses around the world as we ourselves all dealt with, How do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because >>you >>have to go home and then figure out how from home can I make sure that my I t infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there in working safely and securely? You know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and being kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world. But also in India, where it was actually not, you know, not they wouldn't let They didn't have rules toe let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer. You know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home, so that puts extra stress on automation. It puts extra stress on our customers digital transformation. And it just forced them toe, you know, automate digitally transform quicker. And they had to because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers. You have to figure out how to automate all of that. >>You know, one of them >>were still there, all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observe ability, uh, kubernetes serve micro services. So those things again. All Dev ups. And you know, if you guys got some acquisitions, you thought about 1000 eyes. Um, you got a new one you just bought recently Port shift to raise the game in security, Cuban, All these micro services, So observe, ability, superhot. But then people go work at home, as you mentioned. How do you think? Observe, What do you observing? The network is under huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on. People zooms and WebEx is and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the upside? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observe ability, challenges? It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Muraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has This goes entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that Bigger Attn. Bigger scale. Francisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observe ability and the dashboards and the automation of the A P. I s and all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in, um, they had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people toe work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be a nightie conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of I t and the CEO and saying, You know, how is our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home? How many people are, you know, connected and ableto work and watch their productivity? Eso All of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure I t stuff became a board level conversation and you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they're now building in automation, additional transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observe ability. You know, looking for those events. The dashboards, you know? So it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners air doing to really rise to that next level. >>Susan, I know you gotta go, but real quick, um, describe what? Accelerating automation with definite means. >>Well, you've been fault. You know, we've been working together on definite in the vision of the infrastructure program ability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that. And you need the right skill sets in the program ability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people. And it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run. Things are definite. Community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in. They've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals. We have partners, you know, They're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people, Justus, much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got definite create right around the corner virtual. Unfortunately, being personal will be virtual Susie. Thank you for your time. We're gonna dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're gonna dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, John. Okay. >>Mandy, you heard Susie is about people, and one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of definite certifications. Um is getting people leveled up? I mean, the demand for skills cybersecurity, network program, ability, automation, network design solution, architect cloud multi cloud design thes are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh, yes, absolutely. The you know what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning those air. What's accelerating? A lot of the technology changes, and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing, uh, customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like Dev SEC ops engineer, network Automation engineer, network automation developer, which sues you mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current, um, scope and broaden out and take on new challenges? >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um uh, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is. Director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving what's the state of it now? Because with Cove and people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your >>What's your role? Absolutely So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the definite creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and help share technical information with them, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into. How do you really start solving these problems? Eso that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously, Sisco live us. We pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect, as we found out with a much larger audience. So you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of you know how big the convention center is. We were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with are definite day that was kind of attached onto Sisco Live, and we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. But to your broader question of you know what my team does. So that's one piece of it is is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes, new learning labs, things like that that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the definite site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network, where there's there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the definite certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with program ability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up community with, you know, helping answer questions, helping provide content. They move now into the definite spaces well and are helping people with that sort of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I gotta ask you on the trends around automation. What skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are Is there anything in particular? Obviously, network automation been around for a long time. Cisco's been leader in that. But as you move up, the staff has modern applications or building. Do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What people learning? >>Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observe ability was big before Cove it and we actually really saw that amplified during co vid. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observe ability now that we needed? Well, we're virtual eso. That's actually been a huge uptick, and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that air. Now, figuring out how can I do this at scale? I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SCS in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up and one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that I T departments might care about about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at. The old days you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100% things like licenses started coming into play where they need to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the essays actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use them open source, tooling to monitor and alert on these things, and then published it so the whole community code could go out and get a copy of it. Try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and trying to figure out Okay, now I could take that. I can adapt into what I need to see for my observe ability. >>That's great, Mandy, I want to get your thoughts on this, too, because as automation continues to scale. Um, it's gonna be a focus. People are at home. And you guys had a lot of content online for you. Recorded every session that in the definite zone learning is going on sometimes literally and non linearly. You've got the certifications, which is great. That's key. Great success there. People are interested. But what other learnings are you seeing? What are people, um, doing? What's the top top trends? >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time, they want toe advance, their skill set. And just like any kind of learning, people want choice. They wanna be able to choose which matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan. On we have two new expert lead study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do an immersive learning experience together with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kind of team experiences called Automation Boot Camp. And then we're also seeing individual who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, gets, um, skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. And so we have really modular, self driven hands on learning through the Definite Fundamentals course, which is available through DEV. Net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like Thio experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're They're spending a lot of time in our definite sandbox, trying out different technologies. Cisco Technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things, and three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people Skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about. Security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles. So those were three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing more about that at definite create. >>Awesome Eric and man, if you guys can wrap up the accelerated automated with definite package and virtual event here, um, and also t up definite create because definite create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important because it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end program ability. And with everything is a service that you guys were doing everything with a piece. Um Onley can imagine the enablement that's gonna enable create Can >>you hear the >>memory real quick on accelerating automation with definite and TF definite create. Mandy will start with you. >>Yes, I'll go first, and then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, Devon, it's bringing a p I s across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating automation with definite. Suzy mentioned the people aspect of that the people Skilling up and how that transformed team transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so would I think about accelerating automation with definite. It's about the definite community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community with those new skills. >>Eric, take us home. He accelerate automation. Definite and definite create a lot of developer action going on cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for definite day this year for Cisco Live, and we're seeing we're able to leverage it even further with create this year. So whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding a start now track for people that I want to be there. They want to be a developer. Network automation developer, for instance, We've now got a track just for them where they could get started and start learning some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Eso. I love that we're able to bring that together with the experience community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mixed together as well as getting some of our business units together to and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new AP eyes into their platforms? What are the what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together, seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So, like I said, Cisco Learning Network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much. God, man, can >>I add one had >>one more thing. >>Yeah, I was just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions. And, uh, content and speakers and the region stepping upto have things personalized to their area to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for definite create that's going to be fantastic this year. >>You know, that's what God is going to close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now, during with this virtual definite virtual definite create virtual the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups on sharing content. We're gonna learn new things. We're gonna try new things, and ultimately people will rise up and will be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And whoa, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on. The Cuban talk about your awesome accelerate automation and definitely looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Thank you so much. >>Happy to be here. >>Okay, I'm John for the Cube. Virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment Virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching. And we'll see you at definite create. Thanks for watching.

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Volante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with Devon it in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube that in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. >>It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that creativity. So today you're going to hear from a number of experts. For example, TK key Anini is a distinguished engineer and a security pro. He's going to join us, his colleagues, Thomas Scheiber and Joe Vaccaro. They're going to help us understand how to apply automation to your data center networks, cloud, and security journeys. Cisco's Eric nip and Coon Jacobs will also be here with a look into Cisco's marketplace shifts. We'll also hear from dev net partners. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe. It's the cube presenting >>Decelerating automation with damnit >>Brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX, all that great stuff. Any Wade Lee, who's the director, a senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first, then we don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net, create all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme, accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X, a AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as well, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps writing on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the covert hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business to stay alive and to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, uh, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and you know, you guys got some acquisitions youth about thousand eyes. Um, um, you got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game and security, Kubernetes, all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation of the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they had to build it. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home, how many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>I know you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. >>Well, you've been following, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got dev net created right around the corner of virtual unfortunate. Won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard Susie is about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multi-cloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network automation, which Susie >>Mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your, what's your role? >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We committed very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite date that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the dev net site. And then my team also looks after community, such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. And we've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dev net space as well, and are helping people with that servicer. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? Yeah, absolutely. >>So you mentioned, uh, observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we needed? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me all days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licensing started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Awesome. Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up, um, this accelerated automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, um, only can imagine the enablement that's gonna name, uh, create, can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with, at and T up dev net create Mandy we'll start. Yeah. >>Yes. I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, that's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that. The people skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the dev community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with creative this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. >>So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much, God, man, you can add, add one more thing. >>I'm just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is it it's happening in three regions and um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. Yeah. >>I was just gonna close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Yeah. >>The cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment say virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching Jeffrey here with the cube. Uh, we have our ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev net event. It's really accelerating with automation and programmability in the new normal, and we know the new normal is definitely continuing to go. We've been doing this since the middle of March and now we're in October. So we're excited to have our next guest he's Thomas Sheba. He is the vice president of product management for data center for Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. >>Exactly, exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light moment, which was, >>You know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you've got the kids home, you've got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls and their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16th hit and everybody had to go home? >>Well, good point, Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls to zoom calls, but you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more obvious as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it was 2000, he still West, as we say on the data center. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. Right. >>You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. Can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends in the way I look at this trends as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your, your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so in a sense, we, we, we prep was, are normal, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little plot, a little, little, uh, Bret before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if you didn't, if you didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we saw her March. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. >>Yeah, I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of trends, right? The other great trend as public cloud, um, and cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focusing on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might've played some clients reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your things. And so I think in the end, what, uh, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed, but the logic context section, which we see in the, um, last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is excellent. Well, a lot of my discussions, I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focusing and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of automation. Yeah. >>Yeah. That's a good point. And it said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which has in most of the infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just a foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? Right? >>And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools. Uh, and that's a whole range, right? This is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speed, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use normal tools that they have in a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for it further and saying, I want to integrate this with like some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pieces saying, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration was relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right. And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see, uh, giving us, I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about, the cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throats to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer or you, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just to say, sit, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they to actually structure the operation. Right. One of the nice things around this or automation plus a tool integration to an integration is you actually opened us up, not a sole automation train, not just to the network operations personnel. Right. You also open it up and can use this for the SecOps person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, it's literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional process you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I gotta hand over the sec ups team and they can directly call, uh, these, these API is right, or even one step further. You can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>Interesting. You know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously changed software programming for the last 20 years. And, and I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those, none of this is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it's just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes from saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI dcnm controller or our multi-site orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she from Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is the emotion we're in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little clock. And I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at those, whether you're a net ops person or a dev ops person or a SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right? And there's simple things like sandbox environments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code are there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly, then that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation where, and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning is the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily, right? >>That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and it can make the changes and then opening it up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the it's as application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out in and out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happened with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of change the degree of difficulty to get project started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lens, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right? This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I, to operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right? And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's just automation. I think we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private domains, private networks into which have private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing. What, what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment was a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this, Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. Uh, it's really democratization. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>It's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting because we, we started on a Cisco data center. So we started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on, on these products, >>They have all the capabilities there. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them >>Good times for you, because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and social media, right? What what's driving your digital transformation. Is it the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. And I highly recommend everybody roll up your sleeves, you know, the best reasons you can have. >>Yeah. And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So I say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. >>Okay. I look forward to that as well. >>All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>TK Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred. >>Uh, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side, a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are along with a partner DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's, you know, North of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what is that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable, is sort of the phrase that you used. And essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So how can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all the groceries we order, um, uh, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business? Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if when you take the phrase, you know, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. Right? >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I see that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that, that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, or our survey partner, and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the datasets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there, uh, in that, in that dataset. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help, you know, simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about, Oh, what computers are gonna run on or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right. There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical. What are you doing? You're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And frankly, that is, um, that is the, the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines is the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? While we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threat model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything has code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company like companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick-tock, I don't care, but, but, but they, they sort of laid out. This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that and you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy. I mean, beyond GDPR and California, consumer privacy act, um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem, um, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as, um, human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a communities, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>That's a good point. When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to the text-based adventure stuff, like muds and moves. I did a talk at, at MIT one time, and I'm this old curmudgeon in the back of the room. Um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or you, >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, I'm trying to try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems it'd be becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what are you putting on? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than, you know, the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high-performance businesses. >>No, in fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how they're connect, connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters, isn't it? Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all you can talk later is go over here. All your bass players go over there. I'm like, what happened to the band? >>That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I always, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his, his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So thanks. Thanks for inviting me. And I miss you. I, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says doing my part to get Kenny, thanks so much for coming to the cube. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>Come back to the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual will not face to face the cubes. Been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is BC vice president of product, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multicloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area. It's converging multiple theaters in technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you. But first thousand nine was recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talk programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, surely been an exciting six months, 4,000 eyes on the entire team and our customers, you know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the COVID dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, home of the conference book talk track, we'll get to in a second, but exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandon from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home VPNs or passe, maybe it's way. And maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running along for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed us at scale. What's your view on this? And what does thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was early simple connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. When you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say key functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level of level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience. And ultimately the it organization it's really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you have to then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, I was getting to some of these high scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data out of the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're gonna look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. You're first off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right aside, you know, data alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen, and you have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the, of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen with our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then use that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as their employees, >>Classic policy based activities. And you take it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it people like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I gotta ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams are really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their safety VPN infrastructure across, uh, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device and the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you got the cloud. How is your technology help the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and we're in the past, you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need nibbling, that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization, but it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. >>They're having to work collaboratively with the different ISP that they're appearing with with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question when you think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it, teams, um, and see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them. It's got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talked about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a worm situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve the issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you the ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your balance, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same SC land-based rollout, where you're looking to seek benchmark and confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ISP within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that competence, to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights, the classic financial model ROI, you get baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. I mean, who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things. But as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you'd look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the value that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only processing gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you'd say, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need the level of automation. You'd be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking to solve. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>You know, ultimately I think, you know, when you look at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a product perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure it's running upon, but the network gets connected to, and then ultimately the user and the stance of that user, if I leveraging a thousand eyes and being able to then integrate that into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the is looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users will access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be, you know, viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. And we've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on today. >>I appreciate it. Thanks for having me >>Vice president of product here with thousand eyes. Now, part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. >>You really have to automate your human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got >>Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Kuhn, >>Thank you for having me >>And joining him as Eric nappy is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute, because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was Coon. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them is when a flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah, we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic, the just overall the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers. Um, and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a service and elastic, uh, is, is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>Yeah. And then, and then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the S you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CICB pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as code and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. Um, you know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, uh, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's, it's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. Uh, you know, we like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book, and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security changed from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book and, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no I'm so, wow. Cocoon is that you, you found that book on the I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So, uh, I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the I, you know, it's estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis. >>And primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices. That's digitally connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about perimeters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guise of, or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data in the context, what data is being accessed. >>And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable, undercurrent, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We had Dave runs and on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days of Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd? And I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, can really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, cause five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data, just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they'd be able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have hosts there that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing partners and customers employing program ability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that it can provide, uh, bringing on board, uh, those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>Right. >>Right. So Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT and the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an engineer and a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So of itself was a, was a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean obviously if you look back to the very early days of our vision, right, it was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, you were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to meet programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that decision is automated, or if that decision requires some type of a manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough. Like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for it. Anybody that can get there before me, maybe there's a little incentive tied to the incentive. Although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, uh, who achieved it when incentive was secondary. They just wanted to have the bragging rights, like, yeah, I beat Eric, right. >>You know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why, you know, you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well. But I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media meme, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all, all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are. Uh, but, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I believe the stat is this, and I'll probably get the number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I, you know, leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kinda gotten out of the fog of war or frog fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that are customers that people are happier working from home. People are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent in some estimates, put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to >>Stay in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>Interesting. And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part-time right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally going to work from home, unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration, uh, that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events space where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to travel and, and check into a hotel and, and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part-time as, as Eric also explain, but a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team, or, you know, even here in Belgium, our local general manager has a virtual effort, TIF every Friday, obviously skip the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four or five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but it has really, really grown. And, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple of thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really >>About the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes the relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to us. We've seen really people dive into that and customers co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology can provide, but also how it impacts people as we discussed and redefines process >>That the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it's, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and there's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place in the end, the it lexicon as being that critical or that critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with one, another program ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. Right. >>Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, my bell must be happy because the old mother's problem is finally solved. And when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the conversation. >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built, uh, a practice built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power. That's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco DevNet partners and he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want a way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this step, in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the dub net certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. Right. >>That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it, six months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we, we didn't have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in, in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. >>Right. And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. >>Right, right. That's interesting. And Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now, I really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just >>Like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what, what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. >>You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to, to bring it all together. It's, it's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was a, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible. Right, >>Right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of, and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not >>Scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to, to better, to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. >>I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. >>Right. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud multicloud, public cloud. You know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center. >>And then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective and helping customers work through this, because still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like, what did he still look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service. >>And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are, can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But you know, the side from provisioning, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability to, to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right. You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. >>It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. And that thing you used to know what that was. Now, you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that into microservices, you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of them. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit, cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about Deb, not really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or at the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views us as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the dev that specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with their vertical and working with the technology piece, that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes. If the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion, that's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. It happens happy to be here >>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco. What I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net with Cisco. And we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event, hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at dev net create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open for demos where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called straight from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite, um, advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by >>Cisco We're back. This is Dave Volonte and TK Kia Ninis here he's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK My friend. Good to see you again. >>How are you? >>Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, way saw this thing coming, But we didn't see it coming this way, did we? >>No, I have. No one did, but yeah, it, uh that was right before everything happened. >>Well, it's weird, right? I mean, we were you know, we it was in the back of our minds in January. We said Barcelona hasn't really been hit yet. Looked like it was really isolated in China. But But wow, what a change. And I guess I guess I'd I'd start with that. We're seeing really a secular change in your space and security identity access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden, these things have exploded as the work from home pivot has occurred on it. It feels like these changes are permanent or semi permanent. What are you seeing out there? >>Yeah, I don't I don't think anybody thinks the world's gonna go back the way it waas. Um, to some degree, it's it's changed forever. Um, you know, I I do a lot of my work remotely on bond. And so, you know, being a remote worker isn't such a big deal for me. But for some, it was, ah, huge impact. And like I said, you know, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on Thea opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah, And when you see that you know that work from home pivot I mean, you know, our estimates are along with a partner GTR. About 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to co vid, and now it's, you know, north to 70% plus and and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge. But people essentially, except expect that to the you know, at least double that 16% you know, going forward and definitely So what is that? What kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and and how? How organizations are approaching security. >>Yeah, I just think from a mindset standpoint, you know what Waas optional? Uh, maybe, uh, last year, eyes no longer optional. And I don't think it's going to go back. I think I think a lot of people have changed the way you know they live and the way they work. Um and they're doing it in ways. Hopefully that, you know, in some cases, yield more productivity again. Um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works Justus Well, for the bad guys. And so that's That's the balance we need to keep. Which is we need Thio be extra diligent on how we go about securing infrastructure, how we go about securing even our our social channels. Because remember all our social channels now our digital so that's has become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember the line you shared with me in the Cube one time. Is it the adversary is highly capable of sort of the phrase that you used And essentially the way you describe it is you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guys, return on investment, you know, increase their cost, increase the numerator. But as as works just from home, Yeah, I'm in my house, you know, by my wife, I and my you know, router with my you know, dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me. Thio, increase that denominator at home. So how can you help? >>Yeah, I mean, it is It is truly when you think when you get into the mind of the adversary and, uh, you know, cybercrime out there, there, honestly, there, like any other business they're trying toe, you know, operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll they'll frankly go find something else to do. Um, and and again, you know, you know, the shift we experience day to day is you know, it's not just our kids are online in school, and our work is online, but all the groceries we order, You know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season Ah, lot more online shopping is going to take place. Eso you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is you know how How do we up our game there so that, um we can go about our business effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary toe operate on take care of their business because it's nasty stuff. I want to >>ask you about automation, you know, generally and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyper scale er's. And of course, they really attacked the I t labor problem. We learned a lot from that, and an I T organizations have applied much of that thinking and the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace that technology scales today. How does that apply to security? And specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it z the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like ai and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand on operate at machine scale. Now. I mean that for for businesses. I mean that for, you know, education and everything else. Now, so are the adversaries, right. So it's expensive for them to operate at human scale, and they are going to machine scale, go into machine scale. A necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines work on your behalf, Have the machines carry your intent. Andi, when you do that, you can do it, uh, safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should. You wanna make sure that, frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's a tricky thing because, you know, when you take the phrase you know, how do we How do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of of securing the automation first. >>Yeah, we talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that you know, the bad guys, the adversaries essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because they're hiding in plain sight. Right there >>is a, um Well, there's they're clever, Given that, you know, there's this phrase that they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and and being detected. You know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then they have, ah, higher degree of evading your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob who's already been credential and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not, you know, marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavioral anomalies and things like that become, ah, Paramount. But also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to minimize their effectiveness. Um, without e mean ideally without human interaction, because you just can you move faster, you move quicker. Andi, I say that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly you're just making their job or effect. >>I wonder if I could talk about the market a little bit. Uh, it's, I mean, security space cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which, by the way, it's just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that It that massive, uh, GDP. But guys, I wonder if you could bring up the the chart. Because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them what you're what, your biggest challenge to say, lack of talent and and so what? This chart shows this is from e T. R R R survey partner, and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum. On the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence. Pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here I wanted toe put forth to our audience and then get your reaction. So you see Cisco I highlighted in red. Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the on the conference call, and so you can see on the horizontal axis you've got, you know, big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere. But you're right there, Um, in that in that data set and then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. The other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here, and that just adds to the complexity. This is, of course, only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is, how can Cisco help you simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it? You know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions, and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left There it z, I had a customer, you know, Tell me once that you know, I I came to this trade show looking for transportation, and these people are trying toe Selmi car parts. That's the frustration customers have, you know? And I think What Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Because, ultimately that's that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think I think security in general has just year over year been just written with. You need to be an expert. You need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And I think I think those days are behind us. But particularly as as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business. We're not selling to the, you know, T shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about Cloud. People think I put my data in the cloud. I'm safe. But you know, of course, we know it's a shared responsibility model, so I'm interested in your your thoughts on that. Is it really? Is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say no state of security is great in the cloud where, as you know, many of us out there saying, Wow, it z not so great. Eso What are your thoughts on that? That whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think. Cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible? Um, you know, no, no data center required. No, this Dr required, you just get storage. You know, it Z all of those things that are again closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud to is it's really been It's really punctuated the way we go about building systems, um, again, at machine scale. So, you know, before when I write code and I think about what computer is it going to run on? Are you know what servers are gonna Is it gonna run on those? Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire Internet shows up the system, you know, works without fail. And on Wednesday Onley North America shows up, you know, so what? But there's no way you could staff that right. There is just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff. Is, um, it really is the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure is code, and that applies to you know, security is code. That's what you know definite is really all about. I've said many times. I think Cisco of the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only that really has figured out. You know that developer angle because it's practical. You're not trying to force your way into developers. But, you know, I wonder if you could you could talk a little bit about that trend. Andi, where you see it going? >>Yeah. No, that is That is truly the trend. Every time I walk into Devon yet, um, the big halls at at Cisco Live it is Cisco as code. Everything about Cisco is being presented through an A P I. It is automation ready, and and frankly, that is that is the love language of the cloud. Um, it's machines. It's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the I think I think necessary maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What? What's also necessary Eyes thio to secure if infrastructure is code. Therefore, um what what secure what security methodologies do we have today that we used to secure code? While we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So when I when I talk about how do you do automation securely, You do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you threat model, you say, You know, Ken, my adversary exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intended to go. Eso all of those practices apply. It's just everything as code these days. >>Today I've often said that security and privacy or sort of two sides of the same coin and I wanna ask you a question and it's really you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco, and companies like companies like Cisco is responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you could help. And of course, this this, you know, Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies air appropriating our data, tell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, etcetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy. And I mean, it's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're, you know, social media user. I love tic tac. I don't care, but but But they sort of laid out This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that? And, you know, can Cisco play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy? I mean, beyond GDP R and California Consumer Privacy Act. Um, what do you think? >>Yeah, um, I'll give you my You know, my humble opinion is you you fix social problems with social tools, you fix technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem. Um, that needs to be rectified. You know, um, we we weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. Just It's just pretty wrong. So, yeah, that that that that serious did really kind of wake up a lot of people. It is. It is. You know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I saw um but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we we overcome it or we we compensate by what number one? Just being aware that is happening. Um, number two. You know how you go about solving it. I think maybe come down Thio an individual or even a community's solution And what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's it's It's almost I think if I could, you know, play back. What I heard is is yeah, technology, Maybe got us into this problem. But technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic A I bought is going to solve this. It's gonna be, you know, society has to really, really take this on. Is your premise good one? >>When I when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to, you know, the text based adventure stuff like muds and moos. I did a talk it at m i t one time and this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social process that we had modeled in our game and this and that, and this guy just gave us the Smackdown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, You know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy that completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared. If somebody can decide in a minute what is good for the community, it two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community, so it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting. You know, you read the Lincoln historians, and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions. But, you know, ultimately, when he acted, he acted with with confidence. So to that point, but So what else you working on these days? That is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience anything. It's really super exciting for you or you. >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, um, trying, trying to make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's Ah general theme making it simpler for the common person to use tools again. You know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity. It's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can drive at human scale and we can do things. That machine scale and kind of working those two together is it's sort of the magic recipe. Um, it's not easy, but but it is. It is fun So that's that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing I wonder if you see it. Just sort of Ah, obviously a heightened organization awareness. But I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, You know, it used to be the SEC ops team in an island. Okay, it's your problem. You know, the CSO cannot report into the to the CEO, because that's like the fox in the hen house. A lot of those structures are are changing, it seems, and becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what do >>you know? It's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums. Everybody knows their role, and you create something that's larger than you know, some of all parts. And so that that analogy, I think is coming to, you know, way saw it. Sort of with Dev ops where, you know, the developer doesn't just throw their quote over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They moved together as a band. And and that's what I think organizations air seeing is that you know why? Why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just. Here's the product. And here's the rest of the business s. Oh, that's that's That's pretty awesome. I think we see a lot of those patterns, particularly for the highly high performance businesses, >>you know, In fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually seeing that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of, uh and I know sometimes you guys, you know, I don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you gotta leadership structure. Now, I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how their connect connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of you know, of silo busters, isn't it? >>Yeah. No. And you, you Almost as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring a band and say, Okay, all you guitar players go over here. All you bass players go over there like what happened to the band s. So that's that's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines moving together, um, and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. >>Well, I was I always, uh, feel better after talking to you. You know? I remember. I remember Art. Coviello used to put out his, uh, his letter every year. And I was reading I get depressed. Yeah, we spend all this money now, we're less secure. But when I talked to you, t k I I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cubits. It's awesome to have you as a guest. >>Right on. I love these. I love these sessions, So thanks. Thanks for inviting me. >>And I miss you. You know, hopefully you know, next year's we could get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird like the sign says >>doing my part. >>All right, T k. Kennedy. Thanks so much for coming in the queue. We we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte. We've right back with our next guest right after this short break.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco, >>Everybody Jeffery here with the Q we're in our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of Cisco dev net create we've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built, uh, a practice built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power. That's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, a partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here, >>Julie and joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco dev net partners, and he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and, you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want a way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey? I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this step, in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the double net certifications to prove it, help me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. Right. >>It's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it, six months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time, potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning, our customers and the whole digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there. And I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in, uh, we, we didn't have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building in a, at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in, in, in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. Right. >>Right. And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So, uh, for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities that we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that our customers have made, as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. >>Right. Right. It's interesting that Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now, I really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people a competitive advantage, that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center, but what it's really become is place to host >>Your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about the assets per se. We're talking about the applications and what, what do those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to, to bring it all together. >>It's, it's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was, was it a controller or is it the new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense it's actually something tangible. >>Right, right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that have to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandoned their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of, and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look up >>The ability to do that automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to better, to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where, you know, traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability, in a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. >>I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. >>Right. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other >>Hybrid cloud, multi cloud >>Public cloud. You know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center. And then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective and helping customers work through this, cause still, there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like when you, when you move it over there and you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service. And some of it might still be in your data center. Those >>Are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are, can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But you know, the side from provisioning, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. >>You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. And that thing you used to know what that was. Now, you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, I'm breaking that into microservices. You really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of them. Once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Check. I want to shift gears a little bit. Cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about Deb, not really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been >>Talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or at the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views us as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This, what we're doing with the dev net specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into a con into a scenario where it's working with a vertical or working with the technology piece, that they may not have an automation practice for. We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value. On top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes of the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. >>That's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco DevNet shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computers museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together. I hope maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. Happy to be here. All right. Thanks a lot. That's Brad and Chuck. I'm Jeff. You're watching Cisco dev net live coverage on the cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.